About The Touch
Infatuation Blues
Track Time: 4:19
Wow! It always feels so good during the first night, days, weeks, or months of a new relationship. Then that moment can happen, when you wake up one morning, look over at the person lying next to you and think “Well, I’m either going to have to make some kind of commitment here and look for a deeper meaning within this relationship or plead guilty to infatuation in the first degree.”
As I was writing this song, prior to having any idea I would ever record it, I was visioning it as a Delbert McClinton/Bonnie Raitt duet (I wrote this 12 years ago. They were much younger then!), and I was going to try to figure out a way to pitch it to Delbert. When I decided to record it I thought: “Shit, now what am I going to do.” Kelley Hunt (pictured) had completed her piano parts a couple of years earlier so I called her up to see if she was game. She said yes. I sent her the track and she came in the studio and sang against a very weak tracking vocal that I had done while we were recording the initial bass and drums tracks. Kelley did a few takes and seemed like she was struggling a bit to find a groove. We were discussing what kind of “feel” I wanted on the song and I finally said: “Kelley, just pretend like you are singing with Delbert McClinton instead of me. That’s the kind of feel I am looking for”. The rest is history. She ripped it.
Watching Miles Joseph literally create the instrumental feel of this song was one of the highlights of making the record. He asked to hear the first eight or so bars, then said: “Give me a track.” He recorded the first guitar track cold, never having heard the entire song. Then he said: "Give me another track.” He recorded five tracks in succession. About 30 minutes after he started the first track he was done and said: “There you go. That ought to do it. What’s next?”
Steve Gardner (co-producer) wanted me to think about changing the name of the song to ascribe to one of his songwriting rules: “There’s never been a number one song with ‘blues’ in the title”. He was overruled. Besides not wanting to change the whole feel of the song, I decided that I would take the calculated risk to see if I could be the first to have a number one song with blues in the title.
