Mary Strand On the Making Of “Does Any of This Really Matter”
Can you tell us about the inspiration behind "Does Any of This Really Matter" and the story it tells?
The starting point for this song, like most of my songs, was the song prompt I received from the Singer/Songwriter Songwriting Challenge on Facebook. As a novelist, I'm all about telling stories, and it often takes just a single word or phrase to inspire an entire song. In this case, I was a little stumped: the prompt was “sportsball.” I’m a lifelong athlete but had never heard or seen the word. I had to look it up! Mostly thanks to all the sports I’ve played, my knees have taken a beating, so that became the initial inspiration: to talk about the periods of life we all go through: young love, work, families, kids, loss, etc. And yes, wrecked knees! At the same time, most of the songs on this album were written in early 2024, when unexpected health issues triggered two separate near-death experiences for me (not kidding; it was quite horrendous), and in fact I wrote this particular song at the height of those issues. I was in a world of pain that utterly shifted my perspective on the world, society, and life, and it very much spilled into my songs. (I'm totally healthy again now, by the way!) On a positive note, the crisis triggered a whole album: all I could do for quite a while was sit on a couch and write songs.
Were there any memorable or standout moments during the recording sessions for "Does Any of This Really Matter?”
Before we started recording, I played my first take on “Does Any of This Really Matter” for Mark Wade, who’s both my bass player in Mary Strand & The Garage but also a guitar teacher who usually gets the first listen on my songs. I was playing essentially the same chords, but Mark suggested using an open-D tuning, which I’d never done. He also encouraged me to keep floating up and down the neck of the guitar, over and over, which gave the song a dreamy, trippy sound. In the recording studio, Ryan Smith, who’s my lead guitarist but also my longtime guitar teacher, has managed to find one song on each of my albums in which he plays a LOT of instruments. (And he’s very good at choosing which one.) When he heard the psych-rock sound of this, he went for it, playing acoustic and 12-string acoustic guitar, reverse electric guitar, sitar, Mellotron, and piano. It was a blast! It’s actually the only song on this album on which Ryan doesn’t play a straight-up electric guitar, but I played electric guitar (as always) on the song.
What do you like the best about this song?
I fell in love with the open-D tuning and the whole psych-rock, trippy vibe of this. It feels to me like something out of the late 60s or maybe the 70s, and I think of it as my "groovy" song. It’s also a time capsule of life, and when we decided to make it both a single and the final song on the album, those felt like perfect decisions. This song is a completely different sound for me, but I love it. When I was horribly sick and asking the lyrical question of whether any of this really matters, it truly was a huge question for me. But I now know that the answer to that question is an absolute yes.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you got started in music?
I didn’t follow the typical path to music! Although I always loved LISTENING to music, I grew up an athlete, even being offered (but turning down) a college basketball scholarship. Then I went to law school. Toward the end of my years practicing law, I started writing novels, and I left law to write them full time. As a kid I'd had the obligatory four years of piano lessons, but my mom let me quit when I became a varsity athlete in high school. Several years ago, though, I was writing a series of young adult novels (The Bennet Sisters) that heavily featured music, including a high-school basement band. (Minnesota garages are too cold in the winter for garage bands, after all!) And in the fourth book of the series, my main character had to learn how to play guitar in a hurry, so I signed up for guitar lessons … although that lasted only a couple of years: I didn’t feel committed. A few years later, a friend talked me into joining a pay-to-play rock band at Twin Town Guitars in Minneapolis, and that was the start of everything. I live for adventures, and this is quite an adventure!
Do you aim to convey any specific themes or messages through your music?
It depends on the album. On my first album, I didn’t have any theme in mind when I was writing the songs, but I discovered while choosing which songs to put on that album that the theme was love: good, bad, and indifferent. The songs on this second album, I Don’t Need Your Permission (which releases August 1!), are a different story. Since I wrote most of them during a period of medical crisis, when I couldn’t do anything but think and write songs, I spent a lot of time exploring what's important in life. I was also angry: I couldn’t eat, couldn’t even walk around the block, and I was pretty pissed at life. (Big change: I’m usually what my daughter once called annoyingly cheerful!) With that attitude, it quickly became clear that the songs I was writing were focused on empowerment, especially from a woman's perspective. That thought was in my mind as I began writing most of the songs on this album. And like I said, I’m all good now, and I got an album out of it!
