Music

Tension abounds: Josh Mirenda’s current Average Joes single, “Wind Up,” is a perfect storm of excited angst — dramatic outbursts of percussion, nearly unresolved chord progressions, grainy confidence and a plot with a fair amount of mystery. An amped-up couple surges toward heated physicality, though their destination remains unknown. The singer leaves his soul precariously exposed, and all of the requisite emotional peril is felt in the mix of hard-edged music and suspenseful storyline as “Wind Up” moves into a moment of expected passion.

“There’s some danger with love,” Mirenda says. “You meet somebody or something, you got to let that guard down if you’re willing to actually fall in love with somebody. It can be a dangerous, nervous kind of feeling to be vulnerable that way.”

Waiting for love — or to express it — can often build tension, and waiting is a key element of “Wind Up.” Mirenda wrote the song with Will Weatherly (“Thinking ’Bout You,” “Lose It”) and Michael Tyler (“Blame It On You,” “Somewhere on a Beach”) around 2019, with Jason Aldean squarely in their creative crosshairs. They didn’t have a specific title or hook in mind, though when one of the guys landed on a forward-leaning electric guitar groove, it gave them an energetic core to work from.

“We just kind of started messing with an electric and those chords,” recalls Weatherly. It’s “that dark, driving thing. It’s just never bad to aim uptempo.”

The chords are simple: grounded in the key of G, “Wind Up” spends the bulk of its time in C and D chords that beg for resolution and an E-minor that serves as a murky shadow of the tonic. It does eventually arrive at the G, but it only stays there for a mere beat before flicking back to its inherent tension. The sense of mystery had the writers completely engaged, even if they didn’t know where it was headed. They only knew the words had to match the musical undercurrent to work fully.

“As you’re moving forward in a write, you know, the music can drive the lyric, and then the lyrics can continue to drive the music and they can keep working off each other,” Weatherly says. “At the end of the day, you want it to feel like the emotion that you’re saying. You want to believe the singer.”

They developed a chorus first, focused on a couple who is bored with a club. The pair sneaks out to its ride, hitting the blacktop for some intense alone time, though its destination is unclear. That hazy journey matched the essence of the day’s writing process.

“Ironically, it’s called ‘Wind Up’ — the whole premise of the song is like, ‘Hey, let’s just swing for the fences here and see where we wind up,’ ” says Mirenda. “What we did in the room with the idea, it just kind of fit.”

Mirenda and Tyler had primary control of the song’s melody, centering on specific notes that begged for resolution, much like the underlying chords. As they unwound those phrases, Weatherly worked up the track, kicking out a good portion of it before the appointment was done. He focused particularly on the percussion, casting the chorus in half-time rhythms to vary the texture between that section and the verses.

“I love playing with rhythm, so it could be 120 [beats per minute], and it turns into 60 perceptively in the chorus,” Weatherly notes. “Then you go to the second verse and you’ve got the four-on-the-floor [kick drum]; it’s back to 120, like DJ land.”

Weatherly finished the demo that night, and when he sent it to his co-writers, Mirenda forwarded it directly to Aldean, who in turn put it on hold. He held it for a while, though he ultimately decided against recording it. “That happens as a writer,” says Mirenda. “It is what it is.”

But Mirenda couldn’t let go of “Wind Up.” He played the demo frequently and made the song his concert opener. Invariably, fans asked about it after his shows, so Mirenda put it in the mix when he headed into Starstruck Studios last fall with producer-engineer Nick Gibbens (C.J. Solar, Marty Stuart), who used Weatherly’s demo as a road map.

They operated with the same “See where we wind up” ideal as the song. Gibbens told the band, particularly drummer Evan Hutchings and guitarist Sol Philcox-Littlefield, to cut loose on the rocking foundation that Weatherly set, not knowing quite how they would proceed.

“Half the fun to doing any of this is watching dudes that are tiers above anything I could ever play or Josh could ever play, taking our ideas and going three steps further with it,” Gibbens says.

Hutchings applied some wickedly propulsive fills in key sections, while Philcox-Littlefield sculpted a flashy, intricate solo that elevated the energy and tension. It gave them a track that could easily fit between Puddle of Mudd and 3 Doors Down on turn-of-the-century rock radio.

“For all the energy that’s in it, it’s pushing midtempo — it’s not blazing,” notes Gibbens, dissecting Hutchings’ drum part. “We tried to stay on top of the beat with as much subdivision as we can get and just tried to treat it like an early-2000s rock track, like what Josh and I were listening to in high school: the Warped Tour every summer, a lot of guyliner, a lot of angst in there.”

To provide stylistic balance, Mike Johnson slipped in atmospheric steel guitar riffs that mimic the pedal tone in Brooks & Dunn’s “Ain’t Nothing ’Bout You.”

“That is my favorite country song of all time,” Mirenda says. “Brooks & Dunn is my favorite country artist/act/duo/band -— whatever you want to call it, Brooks & Dunn is my favorite. I play it every night in my live show. I do a little ’90s country acoustic medley, and I cannot wait to play that every night.”
Mirenda and crew cut six songs that day, and at the end, they toasted their efforts with shots of Black Sheep Tequila. Mirenda later knocked out the final vocals, managing to deliver a grainy sound and believable phrasing while staying true to the notes.

“There’s not a lot of people that can do that,” enthuses Gibbens. “Cool always beats perfection to me, and he’s able to do both, where he is really accurate with his pitches and his phrasing, but he still puts character on it. And that’s what’s way more important than being perfectly on pitch.”

Average Joes released “Wind Up” to country radio via PlayMPE on March 1, and Mirenda has heard a few spins, thanks in part to some radio friends who have given him a heads-up when it’s scheduled to air on their stations.

“It’s a special moment. It kind of makes me tear up a little bit, even though it’s a rockin’ song,” Mirenda says. “Knowing all the stuff that I had to go through personally and that my family had to go through to get to this point, it’s worth it.”

Wherever the journey winds up.