The month of December was a strange one for us.
For the first two weeks of the month, I flew back to Portland to work with my new business partner, Lou Radja. It was about 1:00am by the time I got back to the trailer from the airport. Jenn was taking off for a week long Portland visit of her own at 5:00am the same morning!
After a short nap I dropped Jenn off at the airport I'd just come from. I returned to discover there was more than just holiday decor waiting for me. Aside from things generally being decorated to the max for the season, she'd left a little tree covered in gift tags.
There just happened to be 12 days until Christmas. There were 12 tags on the tree, which was surrounded by little presents. She'd gotten me everything I'm always looking for, like local honey and two games of chess in a row. It was awesome. I was terrified.
She'd be gone for a week, and I had come up with nothing nearly as creative to give her as a Christmas gift. So I did the only thing I could think of, I picked up my guitar and started writing a song.
At first, it was pretty much just standard cheesy love song lyrics. I worked out the basic chords and a few vocal ideas, then set it aside for a day. When I picked it up again, I had a funny verse line in mind, and added that to the mix. It started to feel like a 90% cheesy, 10% fun song, and I thought, why not just go 50/50?
I re-wrote all the verses to describe everything from how we met (on match.com) to her spirit animal (the glorious Unicorn). Each verse starts with a serious sounding line, then ends with a personal twist or joke.
This is easily my favorite love song I've been lucky enough to compose so far. Owing to our time in Nashville, its even got a bit of a country twang. To really bring home the Unicorn callback, it starts with a short audio clip straight out of Jenn's favorite childhood movie, The Last Unicorn.
