Diablita and the Title Track
“Bluebonnet Plague” — the title track, the song about overcoming abusive addiction — was made with Araceli Linares, who records as Diablita.
We did this one together. She wrote the melody, and she is on the chorus and the outro.
Why the melody is not a small thing
People hear “wrote the melody” and quietly file it below the words, and that is backwards more often than not.
The melody is what people leave with. Nobody walks out of a room humming a verse. They hum the shape of the chorus, and if that shape is wrong the writing underneath it never gets a chance — however good it is, however long anyone spent on it.
I write dense. That is the thing people call Eminem coded, and the risk of writing that way is that density with no melodic frame is just a lot of words arriving quickly. A melody is what makes a line land rather than pass.
On the song carrying the heaviest subject on this record, that is not decoration. It is the delivery mechanism.
Chorus and outro
Those are the two positions that decide how a song is remembered.
The chorus is what people carry out of the room. The outro is the last thing they hear and what determines whether the song resolves or just stops. On a record built to be heard front to back, the outro of the title track sets up everything that follows it.
Her voice is on both.
Why it needed two people
This is the song the album is named after and the one carrying the most weight on the record.
Making it alone would have been possible. It would also have been worse, and probably more self-indulgent, because the thing you most need when you are working on something this close to the bone is somebody in the room who is not you.
Paid, like everyone
Every feature on this record gets $300 in hand, and it is in the published budget as a line I will not cut.
The principle is the floor, not the ceiling: nobody gives me their voice or their work as a favour, and two people on this record are no longer here to be thanked later.
You are supposed to sort that out while everyone is around.