My friends. Welcome to a new series where I perform songs I've written, accompanied in the caption by a short story of how those songs came to be. I am often asked how or why I wrote some of my songs and I thought this would be a creative way to explain. I hope you enjoy it and yes, I'm taking requests. So I look forward to hearing from you in the comments below. Please enjoy Episode 1 with "Home", recorded and made popular by Phillip Phillips, along with a not-too-lengthy story below...

“HOME”
Written by Greg Holden + Drew Pearson

Well, let’s start with the obvious one. The biggest song of my career that has kept the lights on for nearly a decade. “Home” was co-written with a then stranger on a late November afternoon in Los Angeles back in 2011. The scary part of this story is that it nearly never happened. The morning of my session with the lovely Drew Pearson was my 7th co-writing session of my 7th and final day in Los Angeles. I was headed back home to NYC the next day. This was back when I hated co-writing, and felt pushed to do it by my publisher and manager. I was burnt out, over it, and 90 minutes of LA traffic away from Drew, and so I texted my manager asking him to cancel. I didn’t want to go. To my annoyance he said no, and said that I must go. And so begrudgingly I went. I still occasionally wake up in a cold sweat thinking about how different my life would be if he had indeed let me cancel it.

I got to Drew’s studio in Burbank around noon and was gone by 5pm at the latest. As we were awkwardly getting acquainted—standard practice for a co-write with someone you don’t know— he asked me about my life and I ended up divulging about a severely depressed friend, someone I was actually quite worried about at the time.

As we talked I mumbled some melodies over a C chord and out came the verses: “settle down, troubles, demons, alone, etc”… you know, the usual Greg Holden buzz words.. it felt good, emotional and real. We were into it. I’ll admit however that the “chorus” was a lazy mistake. Drew was pushing for a strong melody and I was feeling exhausted and out of ideas. So, I made the best decision of my life; “fuck it, this song doesn’t need a chorus” I thought.. it needs ooh’s so I can get the hell out of here and beat rush hour traffic (I didn’t). I jumped in the vocal booth and laid down some guitars, a rough lead vocal and then blagged my way through some half-arsed ooh’s. The version you know and hopefully love has my lazy-ass ooh’s in the background, the guitar too (mistakes and all) and is Drew’s OG production from that very session. To this day I feel like we cheated the music industry.

I left the session and drove through hell back to Hermosa Beach where I was staying that week, not feeling like we’d done anything particularly inspiring, but also not feeling like we’d wasted our time either. It was a fine song I thought, but then I never really thought about it again. Until that is when I was preparing my setlist for an upcoming European Tour and noticed all my songs were slow and depressing and I needed some more uplifting moments in the set.. I desperately sifted through my more recent songs and stumbled across “Home”. With some reluctance—as it was a co-write and I had quite the chip on my shoulder back then about my solo songs being written only by me—it found its way into my set.

At the end of a sold out European tour—where I’d not only NOT made any money, but actually lost a ton of it—I sat in a leather chair in a Dutch radio station, about to go on air to do an interview. There was a lot going through my head, including the thought of quitting music for good. How can I sell out a weeks long tour and still be broke? How was this a sustainable business model or life plan? Then my phone rang. It was my manager. Before I unleashed a fury of threats to quit everything he stopped me and said, “Jimmy Iovine wants to use “Home” as a coronation song in next weeks American Idol finale and I need your OK… My first question was “how the hell did Jimmy Iovine hear our song?”, followed by “American Idol is still on TV?”. Thank god it was.

A week later I was back home in Brooklyn, watching our little song with no chorus being performed on national television in the American Idol season finale. My friend from Austrailia was visiting me, and he happened to arrive right as it was starting. I handed him a beer, opened one for myself and told him what was going on. An hour later Phillip Phillips won American Idol with our song. Neither of us could believe it. "Cheers", I said, “well, I believe this is going to be quite the ride”.

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