Early on in the pandemic, I found myself binging movies (and I know I wasn’t the only one).
I was particularly drawn to the countless flicks starring Liam Neeson kicking ass, hunting down his missing daughter, or getting back at someone who had wronged him in some way.
I watch movies in the same small room that serves as my home studio. This often leads to me grabbing my guitar or sitting at my DAW to noodle through an idea that was inspired by something I heard in a movie. Maybe it was part of a soundtrack, but sometimes it could be a line of dialogue, or an emotion triggered by a scene.
One evening during my Liam Neeson binge, something prompted me to comb through some ideas I had recorded over the prior year. I noticed that two ideas in particular seemed to work with each other rather well. I started chopping them up and placing sections back-to-back. I recalled how some great songs, like Band on the Run by Paul McCartney and Wings, were assembled from multiple different ideas. I loved how these two ideas worked off of each other – the whole was greater than the sum of the parts!
As this instrumental song based on a couple different guitar riffs began to take shape, I found myself thinking about Liam Neeson’s bad-ass characters and felt that this sort of fit the mood of the music. One of the ideas was particularly influenced by a ZZ Top sort of sound. I also felt like there was a touch of Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin in there. It all coalesced into a funky little instrumental I chose to call, you guessed it…Liam Neeson. My amazing producer Gary Gray helped to give this song a powerful, tight, crunchy sound.
As for the lion…when it was time to publish my song, I needed an image to use when we shared the song. I’ve always found that Liam Neeson’s face bought to mind the face of lion (is that just me?), so I went and found what I thought was a great picture of a lion (on Pixabay – a great source for free images) and added the song and artist title to create the resulting picture you see above.
Drop a comment and let me know what you think!