This song started from a deep sense of isolation and a realization that the world we live in, with all the technological means of ‘connection’ we have, is only making things worse.
It started during a lonely evening, when I took my old faithful acoustic guitar and started strumming and realized one of the string was half a tone flat. I don’t know why but instead of tuning that string properly, I started playing, placing my fingers differently until I realized that using regular fingering was giving some interesting harmonic possibilities.
Almost immediately I had the intro and a groove that I built upon. The verse melody came pretty soon after this, there was no lyrics attached but a sense of melancholic groove and some syllables were forming in my mouth that had to do with “feel” and “real” and it all grew from there.
You can hear an early recording of the guitar alone… the tempo was slower but the groove was already there.
Adding bass and drums was pretty straight-forward because most of the laid-back groove was pretty firmly set by the guitar and the rhythm section only had to go along and accentuate it.