Chords for Corb Lund - What That Song Means Now #7 - September

_ _ _ _ Now [D] I'm sick and brokenhearted [C] and I know what that [G] song means now _
_ _ _ _ [C] Well, I heard him sing old blues
[E] _ _ _ _ Stay with me through September _ _
Summer _ didn't last _ [D] and there ain't [A] nobody in New York City
Could need your half [B]-ass back _
_ _ _ _ [E] _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ [F#m] _ Yeah, [C] we're gonna talk about my September songs
_ This week there's lots I can tell you about this one _ _ _
I'll start off with this D chord.
It's actually an E chord because the capo is in the second _ position
It's it's a it's an E chord, but it's a D shape.
So I'm [B] gonna call it D shape chord
But often when I play these because of the idiosyncrasies of guitar
_ tuning and _ stuff often
When [E] you play a D chord this last note is in tune that's _ _ _ pretty close but often it's flat or sharp
Usually sharp, [N] but it's it's a tough one to
Negotiate.
So when I play this song, I'll actually adjust
Adjust this this string to make sure because often when I play this D shape chord, I just mute out the top of the top _
[E] string
_ like this
_ Which actually makes a D fifth chord
_ [B] D fifth chord with no third but in this song it was important to have the third because it [Bm] gives it that sweetness _
giving it a major third this [E] and _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ It was important for me to in this song to have that that [B] note speak
So I made sure when I recorded it and when [G#] I play live I tune the string to make sure that it [E] sounds in tune
_ _ _ _ [G#]
anyway, that's a
_ Interesting factoid and the same thing happens with the B string sometimes too
So [N] if you're a young guitar player, it seems like in some with some chords
You can never get the B string and the [F#] E string in tune.
That's just the way guitars are
It's an imperfect imperfect tuning system, which is too complex to go into right [N] now
But the way that the the tuning system is tempered on a guitar _ _
It makes it so that well on all instruments really but on the guitar
Because of the change in string from the wound to the unwound.
That's always a place where there's a
_ Sometimes a tuning inconsistency between different chords.
So if you're struggling with that _
Don't worry about it too much.
We all live with it and different people have different sensitivities to
How out of tune they're comfortable playing but just remember that none of us are ever completely in tune because of the tempered tuning system
That we use in the West _
_ _ So that's interesting and then about the song itself
this is a good time to talk about my writing process because
It seems like on every record
there's two or three songs that come at the very end of the session or
Or else right before the recording session start like right at the end of the writing period
I'll get two or three
There's sometimes the best one and I'm not sure what the answer what the reasons that is
I think it has something to do with just having your creativity flowing or whatever, but
_ cabin fever took me about three years to write which is usually
Which is longer than usual and the first year year and a half.
I I banged my head against the wall
I was trying to write and I just couldn't get anything else
Putting in the time and spending hours a day on it because I got that farm boy work ethic thing and nothing was happening
so eventually I just left it alone for a while and
_ I've got a few songs from the early period but about a year
Before I recorded so but after about two years of not having much success in writing anything _ _
The dam started to break and I started to get stuff and then the last month or so before we recorded
I got three songs together that were brand new the grave digger song this song September and
_ _ The getting down on the mountain song and I think those three are some of my favorites on the record
So that often happens.
I'll get one or two near the end of the session the writing session on the recording session
Although sometimes I'll finish one in the recording session, which is really quick.
But my point is
_ _ If you're writing songs and you're starting to write and you have periods where you can't get anything done
Just don't worry too much about it focus on learning to sing better focus on practicing guitar _ _
reading or
_ _ Shooting straighter or whatever.
Whatever you said
the point is sometimes you gotta leave it alone because you just can't force the creativity and I always try to I'm a
I'm a I don't follow my own advice very well because if I'm having a
_ _ Period I'm not writing anything.
I'll just bear down and try and write more and more and it just doesn't help
Sometimes you just got to really just let it go for a while
_ And it seems it seems like if you treat the creativity that way it always comes back around.
It's a cycle, right?
_ so
This song I had a couple months before the recording.
I was living in New York City
_ _ _ visiting a friend and _ I don't really write many love songs because usually they're usually people that write stuff on
Well, not everybody seems to me a lot of times in mainstream radio
What whether it's pop or country or whatever the love songs are kind of fake because a lot of songwriters seem to use _
Relationship songs as sort of a default setting when they have nothing else to sing about or write about or maybe they have to I
What _ it's like in their world, but for me, I usually read about horses or _ guns or whatever
Because it interests me or politics or _ whatever.
I'm into at the time
but occasionally I read a love song because I'm actually going through something and so when I do I try to just make them _
Sort of I don't know.
I try not to get too sappy, but it seems like they
_ _ _ _ hungry _
it seems like
_ Somehow almost all my horse love songs end up
_ veering over into a horse metaphor territory
_ And this is the only one that did although it doesn't mention cows, [F#] but _ I _ especially there's two
There's two hooks in the song that I really like.
_ _ _ I [B] like the part where I go
_ _ _ _ [E] _ _ [F#m]
I can picture
_ [D] your lips _ [F#m]
in a tiny
_ _ [D] Flat [C] I [F#m] guess there's time
_ [D] Thousand acres in the [A] Rocky Mountains Can't compete
[B] That _ _ [G#] line about the thousand acres in the Rocky Mountains kind of gave me the chill [N] the first time I came up with it
_ _ Which is weird.
So I figured if it gave me the chills
I wouldn't do the same for somebody else and I also really like the hook in the very first line of the song
Or the last line of the first stanza in the song where [B] it's a stay with me through
September
_ _ _ _ Summer didn't last _ [D] and there ain't nobody [A] in
City could [B] need you half as bad
so those two lines of my favorite lines in the song and
Usually usually I have a couple a couple little hooks in every song that sort of the rest of it crystallizes around
and those ones especially the New York City lines were the ones in this song that sort of formed the _
[D#] what _ _ _ _ _ _
_ Emotional
_ infrastructure to build the rest of the song around
_ [G#] Usually usually my songs [G] have one or two things that I'm like that and I don't know if they always speak to other people
But there's usually a couple of hooks that [A] I like that speak to me
_ Anyway, [G] um, that's enough about that one
_ _ _ I gotta go _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
[D] _ _ _ _ [C] _ _ _ _
[G] _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
[D] _ _ _ _ [C] _ _ _