One Kiss

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Louis – If there is a quintessential Burnt Toast song, I would say this is it.

It has everything you need for a Toast song.  Bass intro?  Check.  Angel lyric?  Check.  Tempo that picks up speed like a freight train?  Check.

It’s already been established that my memory isn’t the best to go off of, but I remember working on this one in the basement.  I don’t know if bass or drums came first, but I remember Thom and I just kind of “jamming” while waiting for Ingus to get his gear together.

To be very clear here, we didn’t “jam” as a general rule.  We practiced…and we didn’t really do much of that.  We would hang out quoting movies, walking to 7 Eleven, and sometimes play music…often very late at night…and piss off Matgus’ dad…maybe we should buy him a fruit basket or something.

Anyway, we were kind of “jamming”, and the intro just kind of happened.  Ingus grabbed the legendary “Book of 100” ™, dug around for a second and pulled out lyrics that he thought might fit, they did and we were done.  It seems like it was all in one practice (I do, however, expect to be proven wrong shortly).

I’m surprised we only recorded it twice…that being said, we should’ve only recorded it once.  This version is just about perfect.

Ingus -

This version IS really good.  Other things that make this a quintessential Toast song – lyrics involving walking or riding a bicycle, really good harmonies, instrumental break where we could have put a solo but chose not to – all there.  If there had been a lyric about a color, I think we’d have hit them all.

So… blue.  There.

My poor parents.  Maybe we should get them a fruit basket.

nah.

Man.  I miss that 7-11, though.  To this day, I find myself going to the Wallgreens that’s there now for most of my stop-and-grab needs, and I gotta think it’s mostly cause of the residue of going to that 7-11 so much.  Seriously, we’d walk up there at least twice a practice.

Thermos - THIS was the most difficult track, when I re-recorded the bass parts.  Egad.  So many takes to get the tempo correct (there was no guide track for the intro).  But the payoff is certainly worth it.  We had mic’d the bass amp, in ‘95, and I always hated how it sounded.  The direct-in method yielded a much warmer sound.

“One Kiss” stands as one of the only songs truly written by all three of us, so I think we all have a little soft spot for it.  It was, with the exception of some fine-tuning of our individual parts, written in that one session.

I hadn’t been playing bass more than a couple months when we wrote this song, but I still absolutely love – for whatever reason – the little melodic turnaround I do after the 2nd and 4th bars of the chorus.

Live, this song also tends to involve snippets of INXS and The Beatles.

Good times.