This song was inspired by a phrase I heard in the US HBO TV series ‘Treme’ (pronounced ‘Tra-may’) which deals with the problems of the people living in that district of New Orleans as they try and rebuild their lives after hurricane Katrina in 2005.  For some strange reason UK television haven’t bought this well-crafted series - preferring instead to stick to the existing diet of utter crap and banality.  I watched it with my son who’d heard about it and bought the DVD boxed set.  He was a fan of ‘The Wire’ which was made by the same team.

In one episode, a character attributed their predicament and feeling of neglect by the rest of the country to it being a ‘Zero Sum World’; a world comprised of winners and losers with themselves as the latter.  It seems the distribution of luck and good fortune has to add up to zero so that there can never be a world where everyone has a fair share - if you’re fortunate to have some then others must have none or even less.  There’s a parallel here (perhaps intended by the makers of ‘Treme’), with the economic recession afflicting the US and Europe right now where some people are feeling that the pain is not being shared across all sectors of society.

The phrase gave me a great starting point and the lyrics came fairly quickly after that.  I extended the concept in the chorus to matters of the heart: for every one that finds their soul mate there has to be someone who doesn’t.       

Technical notes:

I used Band In A Box RealTracks to provide the main instrumentation of drums, bass, electric piano and rhythm guitar (panned right).  I also produced the slide guitar from RealTracks - three versions edited together which you can hear panned centre, left and right.  I added the string and synth parts as well as rhythm guitar (left).

The project was recorded and mixed in Presonus’s Studio One Version 2 Professional, which I’m using as well as Sonar now.  Studio One is slicker and I’m getting to like it more and more lately.  The final mix was mastered using TRacks3 Deluxe software with limiting (some loudness!) provided by Fabfilter’s ProL limiter.