Behind The Songs - Hostage

Many of the songs that make up Third World Sun’s first CD took a circuitous route to get to where they are today. Indeed most of them even continue to evolve since we recorded them as we continue to play them live. Because of this, I wanted to document how these songs came about before I forget and it all just becomes a blur. - Carhart 

Stream "Hostage" from SoundCloud

Hostage (Johnson, Driml, Carhart)

Although many of our songs predate this song, I consider Hostage to be the first Third World Sun-specific song. A couple weeks after Lori passed away, Scott and I talked about whether we were going to still play together. I had showed him some stuff I had written without Lori and Scott liked it. So he came over and I thought we were going to start going over some of that stuff. Instead, Scott had this grungy guitar riff that he threw at me. I had been heavily listening to Duran Duran at the time, so I did my best to come up with an upbeat, melodic John Taylor-style bass line to go with it (I failed, by the way… as much as we like this bass line, it’s nowhere as cool as John Taylor’s playing). At that moment, we realized that we were going to have a different sound moving forward. Lori’s presence was a softening influence. Without it, we were edgier without even trying to be. I sat down and wrote the lyrics on the spot. It’s about the people who want to hold you back. The negative people. The back-biters and the haters who might pretend on the surface that they want you to succeed but they really want to see you fail. And it’s about the flaky people that you find yourself counting on as you attempt to follow your dreams and what you’ve been called to do. Mike joined Scott and I a week later and the song gelled the first time we played it. Third World Sun was born (although we didn’t name the band for a few more weeks). All of the Launch Pad songs that we carried over to TWS were re-tooled in the shadow of Hostage.