Our first complete song was Feral Dogs. David came up with a simple power chord shape riff and used his loop pedal to put some lead guitar over it. He remembers Googling “what notes go with C power chord.” Problem was, we didn’t have two guitarists at the time, so we had to play the song with the loop pedal to get the lead guitar in there. Neither Ryan nor David had their sense of tempo developed at the time, so it was kind of a nightmare. David had to spend about 10 minutes at the start of every practice getting a good loop so we could play it.

The song was heavily inspired by Ocean Breathes Salty by Modest Mouse, since David was listening to a lot of that album at the time. It even originally started without the short power chord into – straight into the crash, like Ocean Breathes Salty does. The lyrics were about how the news is always such a downer, and they sucked. According to David, “The main thing I remember about writing the song is that I tried really hard to make it not have a verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure, but I could never figure it out.” We all thought the outro was the best part of the song. It took us about 4 months to finish it, which is way longer than it takes us to write a song these days.

Now, David thinks the song is okay, but the lyrics are the worst part and it’s not very original. The drumming and structure are pretty lame too. Ryan says, “Now, it’s not that great and we’ve definitely stepped up.” We also rip off Modest Mouse in a few spots, like almost directly lifting the riff from The Ground Walks, With Time In A Box before the chorus. It doesn’t even fit at all.

Sometimes David and Ryan talk about playing it again for fun. We think it could be alright if we cleaned it up a tad.

Here’s our old drawing of the structure of the song. This might have been an early version of it, we don’t really know.