“Go ahead, leave me like the bed/ Make me a mess.”
Making the bed, according to several websites devoted to healthy minds, is a great habit to start the day, since it promotes organization and gives the bedmaker the sense that their life is under control.
Thus, the hook of Jordan Davis’ “Mess” – with its reference to untucked and untidy sheets – serves as a metaphor for the protagonist’s addiction to a woman. He is, at the outset, on the rebound, proud that he’s getting his life back in order after their difficult relationship. But at the end of the first verse, he places a call, admitting in advance that he’s “10 kinds of crazy” for triggering an activity he knows will undo all of his progress and send him spiraling back into the emotional depths. He calls her anyway.
“It’s a sad fella,” Davis says. “He needs more friends.”
Davis conveyed to his musical friends a desire to take more chances as he prepped his next album, and they generally accommodated him.
“If you’re staying the same, and you’re recording the same songs and writing the same songs, you’re not really growing,” says his brother, co-writer Jacob Davis (“Buy Dirt,” “Backseat Driver”).
With that in mind, Jacob, Travis Wood (“I Ain’t Sayin’,” “Girl in Mine”) and Jordan’s longtime producer, Paul DiGiovanni (Luke Bryan, Alana Springsteen), met May 6 in the basement studio at Universal Music Publishing Nashville to work on “starts” – initial, incomplete song ideas. DiGiovanni’s experimentation with someone else’s guitar got things off the ground.
“There’s this old Telecaster – I don’t know who owns it – in the basement of the Universal Studio,” he notes. “It’s like a parts caster – it’s just all these parts bolted together, basically, and it’s kind of trash, but kind of incredible. And I kind of want it.”
He developed a pulsing feel with mostly minor chords and applied some atmospheric bends. They batted around potential one-word titles to pair with it – “Disaster” was among them – until Wood suggested “Mess,” which felt more singable.
The opening verse established the character in a state of recovery – he’s stopped drinking, gotten clear-eyed and is sleeping well. It all sounds confident, though there’s something off-kilter about that stanza. It’s a big pile of words, and the syllables that are ideal for emphasis don’t line up with the melodic notes that get emphasized. That provides a bit of a clue, perhaps, that the guy isn’t totally in control post-relationship, and by the end of that verse, he’s calling for a hookup, knowing even as he places the call that he’s going to regret it.
The chorus broke open with two major chords, and the two people fumbled their way down the hall in the story while the musical progression tumbled downward, along with the protagonist’s self-respect. The chorus closed with that boudoir metaphor: “Then go ahead, leave me like the bed/ Make me a mess.”
“Through the chorus,” says Jacob, “you find out that he’s just addicted to her.”
The musical elements changed from verse to chorus. The verse’s watery flow shifted into firmer phrasing in the chorus. They used a melodically ascendant melody in a two-line pre-chorus to connect those pieces, capped by a three-word transition suggested by DiGiovanni – “Baby, could you” – that pulls double-duty. The line sets up the chorus, while the word “you” lands on the first beat of the chorus.
“I thought that sounded like a smash once we figured out that transition,” Wood says. “And it’s also one of those moments where the vowel sound was the perfect sound. You couldn’t have changed that vowel, the ‘ooo’ sound. It could not have been another sound.”
Jacob sang the melody for that initial demo, mumbling more vowels and consonants in the spots where they hadn’t yet determined the words, and they got it to Jordan, who was sold on its potential. “The melody just locked me in,” he says. And, he adds, “I just loved how left-footed that verse feels.”
Jordan joined the other three on May 26 at Universal, and they hammered out the rest of the song. He had some ideas about how to work through the second verse, which came together surprisingly well, given that they needed to line up the phrases so that verse two was as left-footed as verse one.
“Working with a lot of syllables actually is easier sometimes to write lyrics to, because you have more words to put in,” Wood notes. “In fact, the chorus was harder because it was more sparse. Every little syllable really, really counts. So, you have to use a lot of good word economy to express an idea.”
DiGiovanni produced it among four songs at historic RCA Studio A in the first session he’d done with Jordan at that location – another sign that they were shaking things up – and it created a different atmosphere, given that the room opened 60 years ago, when cultural rules were different.
“I’m just like, ‘Oh, people smoked cigarettes in here,’” DiGiovanni remembers. “There’s pictures of all the history on the walls of everyone that’s been in there. It feels important and cool, and it gave us something special, I feel like, for this this song and this album.”
The pulsing guitar tones he’d weaved into the demo remained, but Derek Wells added new guitars that heightened the addictive angst expressed in the lyrics. DiGiovanni took advantage of Studio A’s roominess, placing five mics in different places to capture Wells’s performance, and the microscopic differences between those stacked parts created additional unease in the sound.
“My favorite part about [the track] is the guitar tones,” Jacob says. “There’s a crunchy, almost grungy, dirty guitar in there that is so cool. I don’t think there’s ever been that guitar tone on a Jordan song ever.” Jonny Fung played pedal steel guitar during the recording date, marking another change. Jordan had previously asked steel guitarists to play parts that felt more like a slide guitar to accommodate the lineup of his road band.
“This record,” Jordan says, “Paul was like, ‘Dude, I don’t want to do that. If we’re gonna do it, we’re gonna do it.’ And we full-on went into every session with a steel and plans to make this a prominent part of this song.” The players ended the song abruptly, feeding more left-footedness into the performance.
“We really wanted it to just fall apart,” DiGiovanni reasons. “It’s called ‘Mess,’ you know.”
DiGiovanni recorded a vocal harmony part for it, then sent the production to Trey Keller, who added more complex background voices, including a stacked performance on the “Baby, could you” transition that heightens the contrast between verse and chorus.
In the end, Jordan had a safer option available for a single, but the bulk of his team wanted the riskier “Mess.” MCA released it to country radio via PlayMPE on Sept. 10. Its change of sonic pace is jarring at first, though it feels like a natural next step with repeated exposures. “Mess” stands at No. TK on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs dated Oct. 24.
“It’s kind of good to take a swing and feel a little anxious to see how it how it goes over,” he says. “If we miss, we miss. It is what it is. It’s music.”
Nothing messed up about that.