coastal alt/indie rock

​​Field Notes​​

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Every song has a seed.

It might be a drumbeat, a lyrical line, a guitar riff, or even a particular keyboard sound. You hope that seed will grow into a tree. Most of them don’t. Some of them do.

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“Love Is a Contact Sport” grew from two completely independent seeds.

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The first was the title. Songwriters are always listening for phrases that sound like songs, and at some point I came up with the line "Love is a contact sport". I thought, “Well, there’s a song right there.” So I wrote it down, and it sat in my notebook for years.

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The second seed was the guitar riff.

If you’ve heard the song, that probably comes as no surprise. I came up with the riff on guitar, recorded it, and then left it sitting in a folder for a while. Eventually, the title and the riff found each other—and the song took off from there.

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I make no apologies for being a fan of Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, and all those great ’70s and ’80s bands that knew how to build a song around a big guitar riff. That’s the music I grew up with, and “Love Is a Contact Sport” lives unapologetically in that world: loud, playful, riff-heavy rock and roll.

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Once I had the chorus —

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Love is a contact sport
The more you play, the more that you get hurt

Love is a contact sport

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— the rest of the song practically wrote itself.

Boxing, hockey, football: every contact sport offered another image, another joke, and another opportunity for innuendo. It became an enormously fun song to write, not a laborious process like some songs can be. And - considering that I wrote it in 2004, it’s still one I really enjoy.

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All the humor and innuendo don’t make the central idea any less true.

Love really is a contact sport.

If you’re going to play, you’re going to get hit.

You may get hurt.

And somehow, knowing that, we still step onto the field.

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