Wow, we got way behind on this. Sorry, everyone.
So, in our valiant attempt to catch up, here's our thoughts on "A Letter To Jessica."
James: I originally wrote the hook for this song when I was 19; I was, actually, having a semi-regular postal correspondence with a lady-friend whose name was, incredibly, Jessica. Yes, kids, WITHIN YOUR LIFETIME, you have met someone who actually sent letters. In the mail. On paper. Anyway, I was having a bad day, wishing she would hurry up and answer the damn letter I had sent, and somehow, hit upon the happiest sounding hook I think I've ever written. It was, of course, surrounded by a whole song's worth of not very good, though Dan decided to add horn-line-style backing vocals to it.
Flash forward an amount of years I'm not wholly willing to disclose, and one afternoon, the hook just popped back into my head. The previous day, I would probably have told you, if asked, that I'd never written a song with someone's name in it. I populated the rest of the song with the sort of trenchant social critique and withering satire about the student loan crisis and the death of Saturday delivery that you've come to expect from me, sketched out a few vocal harmonies, and we were on our way.
Dan used to play harmonica on this live, and it was well and good, but he refused, outright, to play it on the record, feeling that he couldn't do justice to what we wanted. We already had Lee Morgan coming in for "Summer," so we borrowed him for an extra few minutes, and he, as per usual, delivered. Thanks, Lee!!
Dan: Trust me, no one wants me to play harmonica in a recorded medium.
I remember this song when it was originally written by James, back when we were late-teens. It was a full band arrangement back then, with kind of a Lovin' Spoonful vibe to it. It was played out a bit, mostly because we loved doing the fake horns-as-backing-vocals trick (an idea I gladly stole from The Who), and then lost to wherever songs you write when you're 19 go.
When James brought it back, with better lyrics and a more cemented arrangement, I was delighted to find that I still actually liked it. And we had four vocalists now, which meant we could really make it work as a vocal piece more than a rock-band piece. We used to come off the stage into the middle of the room and do this one when we were The Sobriquets, and it always had an effect on people (the hook to this and the hook to "My Father's Watch" are the two most heard being hummed by people after the set). It broke the set up nicely, and it was That Thing that we did that was different from other bands that we played with. I miss doing it in The Way Home, but we're working on that, and it should be back in the live sets very soon.
Nick: I don't like surf hand claps. There's a certain kind of default hand clapping that happens in sing-a-long type songs (think the Happy Days Theme Song) that for some unknown reason I can't stand. And for some unknown reason I like to tell people about my dislike of those handclaps. And for a very specific reason, the rest of The Way Home loves to clap in this manner whenever they are in my presence.
When recording "Letter to Jessica", I needed to be alone in the vocal booth while everyone else stayed in the control room to watch. I was looking down at my feet until it was time for my part, and when I picked my head up to start singing, everyone on the other side of the window was dancing and clapping my "favorite" hand clap. I think they thought it would mess me up, but I thought it was funny and it inspired my performance and made singing the harmony part a lot more fun, actually. So, mission accomplished, everyone. Eyyyyyyyyyyyy.
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