WHILE YOU'RE HERE
One Guitar Chord Started This Whole Song
“While You’re Here” actually goes back even before Dirty Little Secrets. It was one of the songs on my very first EP, which means it was truly one of the earliest songs I ever wrote.
I remember sitting around playing one of my favorite guitar chords — the classic Hendrix-style chord (E7#9) that has this gritty, funky sound to it — and the riff for the song came together almost immediately. Then the melody and lyrics followed really naturally after that.
Some songs take forever to figure out. This wasn’t one of them.
That’s probably part of why I’ve always loved this song so much. It came from a really instinctive place, before I was overthinking anything.
It also ended up becoming the first song of mine to really find a life beyond my own records. Over the years, “While You’re Here” was featured in TV shows and films like Dawson’s Creek and Dancing at the Blue Iguana — usually during some pretty sexy scenes 😜
The performance you’re watching here was filmed in 2004 during my Breathing Underwater release party, which made it fun to revisit one of my earliest songs a few years later with a full band behind it.