As I said previously, I realized I didn’t have any love songs for the “Call Me Ishmael” album. So, just before we decided on the songs we would use for the album, I sat down to focus on writing a couple of love songs specifically for it.
I liked the "Love is the Drug” metaphor that “Strung Out” conveys and concentrated on writing the song around it. This song came together relatively quickly. I used a lot of major seventh chords throughout, to give the song a smooth jazz feel to it. Then I recruited my daughter, Kelly, to sing the female lead and harmonies with me.
I had written the instrumental melody for guitar, but then we came up with the idea of replacing the guitar with a muted trumpet. Then to make it truly unique we added a back and forth exchange of the trumpet with a violin. This really helped the song take on the feel of a smokey jazz lounge we were looking for.
I played all the guitar parts, Rob Hall was on bass, Fabian Chavez was on conga’s and Stephen Haaker was on drums and Aaron Durr was on piano. John Manness and Bonnie Brooksbank made amazing contributions on Trumpet and Violin respectively. My daughter Kelly Ciurczak shared lead vocals with me and sang all the harmonies. The song was engineered and produced by Brett Grossman and Stephen Haaker. We recorded everything at Perfect Sound Studio’s in Frogtown and Cosmic Voyager Studio in Los Angeles. The song was Mastered by Emily Lazar from the Lodge in NY.