David Dunn – The Color Of Hope

Normally when I write a song, I take a maximum of six hours to mess with it. I might change it up, but usually it’s three hours. “Yellow Balloons” was a song I wanted to write about this specific story, and I think I spent about eight months on that thing, rewriting it over and over again. The reason it was so hard to write was that I wanted it to say, “This is what happened but God is using it for good and she’s in a better place.” I wanted to put a happy spin on it, the things that I know in my brain that are true. God is in control, and all of that.

However, I just couldn’t do it. That’s not how I felt about it. The way I feel about it is that this thing sucks and it hurts. It doesn’t seem fair. A lot of times when someone dies, you celebrate his or her life. When an 80-year-old dies, you celebrate their 80 years. The same thing with a 50-year-old. Somehow even with a 20-year-old, there is some life to celebrate but for a two-year-old, you’re only a year into cognizance. It’s all a bitter pill to swallow. So the song ended up being more of a, “This is impossible to stomach without you being with us, God.” My sister actually helped me write that song.

CCM: When you have so much emotion, how hard is it, then, to distill all of that down into a three or four minute song?
DD: The thing that comes easily and is relatively simple is getting the musical element down. That’s just a feeling-thing and it usually comes naturally. The hard part for me is being succinct with the words—getting the lyrics right. The issue is first being able to grab the correct words and having the right ones together, but it’s also about having a vision of where it’s supposed to go and sticking to it. That’s why “Yellow Balloons” was so hard to write because my vision kept changing for what I wanted the song to be—or it was inauthentic at the beginning. Not because it’s not true, but it’s not where I was.

The process is almost directly related for where the vision of the song is supposed to be. That determines how easy the song is to write. There are a lot of different working gears and parts in a song, so I would call that a simplified response, but that’s how I look at it. You get the bucket and then you start reaching in and pulling different pieces out.

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