Ok here is the mix with some adjustments as suggested. I just realised that in the last iteration of the mix, I accidentally put a mono plugin across the harmony buss and didn’t notice it until now (d’oh!)…
Asking me to describe the songwriting process is an honor, but it implies that there was a process. I’ll be happy to give it a shot, but please don’t take this with some false sense of reverence, because I certainly don’t.
I honestly feel writing songs takes some work, but for the most part my process is very simple; I get an idea, whether it’s a phrase or a guitar part, and I try to flesh it out. If it doesn’t start coming fairly easily, I’ll let it go. I don’t believe in laboring over a tune very much until I have a pretty solid idea that there’s something there I can finish.
In the case of Mean Girl, it just started with a little phrase about meeting a woman in a pawn shop. For some reason, that gave me enough of a story to work with to know where I could take the story. I also made a conscious decision (rare for me) that I would work on telling a story in a short period of time, maybe 2 verses.
That decision meant I would need a chorus that would tie the verses together and really make sense out of the story. So, through a series of mental permutations, the woman in the pawn shop became my Mean Girl, and I was kind of off to the races as soon as I had the line: “I met my Mean Girl at the pawn shop”. If you say that phrase evenly about five times, you have the rhythm and cadence of the body of the song. Once I have that, I can usually piece a song together and it starts going fast.
From there, the main guitar riff kind of presented itself as a call and response to the verse, with the little double stop bend punctuating many of the lines, like “Pawn Shop” “Truck Stop”, “State Cop”. That made it feel like I was tying the music and lyrics together, and gave me the momentum to finish the song and get the arrangement set up. The bridge came pretty easily, since to me it was a logical conclusion to the story with a little irony built in; I was in love with a woman whose mood could change on a dime, and was a little dangerous, to the point that the cops might drag her home in the middle of the night, but the danger was too much fun to give up.
The orchestration of the song happened over a few months. I’d sent Andrew a demo with just scratch tracks to see what he thought of the song as an idea, and he gave me some feedback on a very rough version of the song. If AJ is reading this, I played the bass pretty straight on the demo, which just had a click track on it. Andrew said he heard the song starting and stopping with the bass, so I thought about that a bit, and then sent the same demo off to Aaron, the drummer I’m working with, who lives in Michigan.
Aaron is a great player, but he really works out what he’s going to play prior to tracking anything. This gave me a couple of months to actually start fine tuning how I was going to play and sing everything before he sent his drum tracks. At that point I scrapped the demo, and started tracking the guitar and bass parts. It also gave me time to work out the little solo, which is supposed to sound kind of like a rock guy doing a parody of a country guy, and is a bit of a string bending festival.
At that point, I had enough to send to Andrew to have him start working, and he sent me a great snippet to check out, along with the idea of adding some honky-tonk piano. As it happens, a very good friend and former bandmate of mine lives nearby, and is a go to guy for that kind of stuff, so he came over and banged out what you hear in about two hours with me kind of giving him ideas of where the licks should go. To me, the addition of the honky-tonk piano licks adds just enough interest to keep the hooks rolling throughout the tune.
Once all that was done, Andrew and I had a little back and forth, and I sent him a relatively short list of requests to get the tune to the stage it was in his first post of it here. He truly is like an extra musician in the mix, and it is great that he and I seem to read each other very well, so our suggestions to each other are generally very effective. I know the basics of mixing and production, but for me to come even close to what he accomplishes with my music would be years of trial and mostly error. I honestly can’t thank him enough for all his help and input. Most of this stuff for me is done in isolation, so an intuitive extra set of ears is invaluable.
That’s pretty much it, unless you want the gory details. Most of the guitar is a PRS SE through a Marshall DSL 15C with a Sony condenser mic. There are two Scuffham tracks in there that Andrew added some twang to. The bass is run through a POD HD300 on a Bassman setting, but most of the sound is from Andrew’s triple threat treatment which he can elaborate on.
To anyone who made it through all this, thanks for your time and effort. I wish I could give you more useful information, but each song for me is its own experience. In truth, I’ve been doing this for a long time, and the only way it works for me is to just let it unfold and keep refining it until I’m satisfied with the results.
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nice! 
In terms of the mix, it’s wrap for me, all points covered well - great job!
But…
Did you check the loudness after the frequency cuts Andrew? I reckon you’ve lost up to 2db/LUFS.
Yes, I noticed that, but in these days of loudness normalisation, I didn’t think anyone would complain about it not being loud enough. 
No, but if it’s going together with the other Bob stuff they all need to be level with each other. Also, loudness normailization is out the window if the track goes on to a CD.
Also, if people are comparing the four BTR submissions it will be difficult if they aren’t levelled up - you may get some inaccurate bashing as a result.
Thanks for protecting me against that evil Andrew guy, AJ. Thanks for the input.
For anyone interested, Bob @StylesBitchley and I have started a new thread outlining the production and mixing process of this track here:
For anyone that cares, we decided to go with the final mix, which incorporated all the improvements everyone suggested. To me, it sounded a little cleaner on the bottom end, and there was a little bit more detail in the mix. Thanks to everyone who contributed, and to Andrew, who amazingly made it sound better on every pass.
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