Little Sandy Suite

Little Sandy Suite

Part 1: Autumn/Winter 

Deep East Texas, hills and pines                                                         
Been going there since I just turned 5 years old                      
A two-hour drive, from my hometown                                             
Another world, let the old one spin around and around               
Our cabin small, the fireplace bright                                                 
Pine trees tall, the stars at night – just you and me, and family  

Bridge:
That old world spins round and round                 
Traffic, people, tightly wound                                
The air is clean here, we can breathe                   
Another world, just you and me                            

Our cabin small, the fireplace bright                                                  
Pine trees tall, the stars at night – just you and me, and family  

Part 2: Spring

Instrumental

Part 3: - Summer

Clouds drift across the sky.        
Shimmer heat waves, in July     
It’s too hot to go outside           
We’re fine indoors, you and I.

Lazy mornings here.                    
Lay beside you, disappear.         
You can see me, it’s all I care.    
The world is outside, unaware. 

Transition back to Autumn/Winter 

Our cabin small, the fireplace bright                                                 
Pine trees tall, the stars at night – just you and me, and family                  

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Little Sandy Suite – Little Sandy is a very old hunting and fishing club in East Texas, about a two hour drive from Dallas. I came up with a progression I liked and worked on that some. Leslie and I agreed that we needed to write some songs that weren’t either love songs or break-up songs, and that’s how we came up with Little Sandy Suite and Full Moon Pass. When I first worked on the lyrics for Little Sandy I found it was too cheesy. I was trying to sing all about the things we do at Little Sandy and that just didn’t work. So instead, I kept the first verse and the bridge only. I thought it would work just to try to give the “feel” of this place rather than a description. The first section of the song is “Autumn/Winter”. In the studio when we recorded this, I had a very specific style I wanted Jack Maynes to play. I told him I wanted it to sound like the piano in the intro of “Thunder Road” by Bruce Springsteen, using the treble part of the piano only. Jack had never heard it before, so he pulled it up on his phone, listened for a few second, and then made Little Sandy his. The middle section is “Spring”. I’ve had this bossa nova progression in my head for the past 45 years, and finally got to use it in a song. My intention with this section was to let the session players improvise, and the three times we played it in the studio was a lot of fun for me to just watch and listen (and play rhythm acoustic guitar). I think it catches the springtime feel of East Texas, everything coming out of winter and the new growth of everything. The last section is “Summer”. East Texas is hellishly hot and humid in the summer. Temperatures over 100 are fairly common, and the humidity is always high – similar to Louisiana to me. I wanted the feel of the song to be slow and lazy, and for the lyrics to be the same. This section is in 6/8 time, which was fun. This section transitions back into the first section for a short time and then ends. It’s the cycle of the seasons. It ends on an Amaj7 chord, one of my favorites. It just sounds so positive. Scott did a great job of making the transitions between the four sections work seamlessly.