"Sally Mae" was written in December 2016, the first song to come out after a 2-year songwriting hiatus. I had lost my mojo after my first band had broken up and gave up on music for a while. Eventually, I was told of Bar de Courcelle's music nights, which I began attending with great joy. I met a great cast of people who inspired me greatly. I've since filmed a video for the song in the bar and it became my first "hit" with the crowds there.

So one day, I ended up in a hospital due to an eye complication. I waited for hours in the emergency, but the issue didn't get resolved that day. What did get resolved was my songwriting dry spell. As I sat there waiting, perusing my social media news feed, I came upon an idiom that someone had misremembered and I decided to use the correct one in the appropriate fashion, which gave way to a stream-of-consciousness tale about a woman named Sally Mae, who I had befriended and couldn't really help to get out of a troubling time. In those days, I was listening to very old Blues music and realized how easy it is to write a song using that format and how catchy the melodies could be, given the simplistic nature of the chordal structure. This spawned years and years of Blues music out of me.

There is a reference within the song to Bar de Courcelle, the place that re-started it all for me, a place that still holds the dearest place in my heart.

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Back in Aug. 2017, My producer Sam Harvey and I began the recording process at Studio Le Nid (operated by Pilou a.k.a. Peter Henry Phillips), whilst Pilou was away on vacation. We laid down the acoustic track and scratch vocals, then I recorded the drums over top of the bed tracks. We didn't have much time to record the rest, so we left this song and a couple others sit and stew for a few months.

Later on, Sam Harvey had set up his own studio, due north of Montreal, with very fine technology and less time constraints. So, we took our time to add all the details, including my first attempt at a jazz solo, mouth bass, backing vocals, various percussive twists (Sam recorded an entire track of crumpled paper accents, which we kept).

More recently, we had the phenomenal Mégane Cyr come in and provide a wall of background harmonies on the chorus to flesh it out a little bit, but other than that, I haven't touched this track in a long time, but its time has come to flourish a little bit.