I'm going to occasionally profile songs off "The Tales of the Troubadours" - starting with this one.
Dust Storm was created because I had recently become obsessed with the FourOnTheFloor drum pattern - you know what I'm talking about. Constant kick on the downbeat, make you shake your rump type stuff. I had never created a song with this pattern throughout the entire track - I got the kicks sounding nice and picked up the bass.The bass has a lot of movement, it climbs up each chord then bounces back and forth then repeats, then jumps up to the next chord and dances some more. The turnaround is simple and I let the drums do a bit of the talking with the syncopated steel drum hits.
The blues felt right at home - so I ran with it. It's a classic 12 bar pattern, Colin decided it would be cool to play with the turn around segment and repeat a phrase instead of a classic hook. We initially got the song idea from a friend of mine, we posted on Facebook for ideas to write a song about and my buddy responded "Dust storms, cause that shit is real." Right before the center I wanted the energy to pick up, adding the swirling guitar solo, along with the syncopated snare hits achieved this nicely. I wanted the center, or the 'eye of the storm' to be calm, so I broke the beat down and put my voice all alone in there. After the eye comes the chaos once again, and then the song tails off into the distance. It's the perfect opener for this album.