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The Stories Behind the Songs on Single #17
Thu., Sep. 15. 2022 10:40am EDT
J. Jackson, lead singer and lyricist for ApologetiX here again.
Here are the stories behind the songs on our 17th single of 2022:
YOU SIMPLY WRITE DOWN (MY DIRECTIONS)
I first mentioned the possibility of spoofing "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)" to our keyboardist (and drum programmer) Rich Mannion on March 10, 2021, but I had no idea what we'd do with it (if anything at all) until August 3, 2022. That morning, I got the hook line of "You simply write down, David, write now."
Initially, I thought of the Psalms, but two days later a variation of the line came to me: "You simply write down plainly right now my directions." If we decided to go with that line, I figured it would have to be about Moses or one of the prophets or Apostles. I liked the "my directions" part but hated to not have "David" in it.
Then, I thought, "Wait a minute! Didn't David say somewhere that God gave him instructions for how the temple should be built, even though Solomon was going to be the one to actually build it?" Sure enough, even though it's not included in the story in Second Samuel, it's in the parallel account in First Chronicles:
"All this," David said, "I have in writing as a result of the Lord's hand on me, and he enabled me to understand all the details of the plan" (1 Chronicles 28:19).
And that's how we were able to combine both line ideas I had to make "You simply write down, David, right now my directions, David, write them down now." Additional lyrics soon followed, leaving no doubt in my mind it was the right way to go.
This was the first parody I sang after Jimmy's motorcycle accident, so I had to record my vocals at Wayne's studio. Rich did all of the instrumentation.
YOU'VE GOT TO WRITE STUFF
I became a born-again Christian in early 1988 and didn't listen to much secular music at the time, so I missed the initial onslaught of New Kids on the Block later that year. They were designed for a different demographic anyway. My wife, however, is a dozen years younger than I, and the New Kids were her first musical crush.
On July 19, 2022, I took her to see them when they came to Pittsburgh along with Rick Astley, En Vogue, and Salt-N-Pepa. Of course, by then they were no longer "new" or "kids" ... and they'd been around "the block" a few times. Just a little over a month later, the idea for "You've Got to Write Stuff" popped into my noggin.
As soon as I got the lines about First John, Second John, and Third John, it was pretty obvious whom the song would revolve around. We'd done parodies from the perspective of the Apostle John before (like "Go Right Now," "Let Me Sit Next to Messiah," "Hosanna," and "Spread the Way"), but I thought it would be neat to show how he wrote five books of the Bible, making him the second-most prolific New Testament author.
The Apostle Paul was responsible for almost three times as many books (13 or 14, depending on whether or not you believe he wrote the Book of Hebrews), but he only wrote epistles. John wrote three of those plus a Gospel and Revelation. His epistles are brief — in fact, Third John and Second John are the two shortest books of the entire Bible — but each of his other two books has over 20 chapters.
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