Basically My Friend Jerome started with the idea of writing a song about a clone who kills himself because everyone is picking on him for being a clone. I have a theory that power, the ability to affect our environment, is how we prove to ourselves that we are alive. We can create a piece of software, we can win the big game, or we can kill someone. The same goes for other animals too, including bugs and Martians.

I almost always write the lyrics first which is different from most songwriters I know. I believe in the idea that a decent song should be able to be played with an acoustic guitar and vocal and still sound good. In the case of My Friend Jerome I sat with an acoustic guitar and played around with chords and melodies and tried to fit the words in. In order to do this the words got changed quite a bit. Originally I had a whole different chorus but I found it only served to complicate the song.

Although it was terrific fun walking around town shooting up cop cars while armed with two hot chicks and some paint-ball guns, I decided we should quit while we were ahead, go to the mountain and finish off the Jack Daniels. There, in the drunkenness of the early morning, I began to climb down the dark mountain side. I was hoping the girls would follow me so I could ask them important questions like why their shoes didn’t match their hair. It was then I lost my rapport with gravity and tumbled head over heels a hundred and fifty feet down the mountain. I was lucky to land on top of a lonely tree.

For those rare musicians infected with a desire to create true original music an understanding of the relationship between a composer and his work is beneficial. At the core of this relationship is the fact that music reflects a musician's values but what exactly are values and how are they expressed by individuals and collaborators in music?