Behind The Songs - T-Shirt Generation / Bad

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. I wanted to document how these songs came about before I forget and it all just becomes a blur. - Carhart

Stream T-shirt Generation/Bad from Soundcloud

T-shirt Generation / Bad (Johnson, Driml, Carhart, Carhart / Bono, The Edge)

This one was Lori’s concept. Much of the lyrics were hers as well. While Lori and I were working it out, she was just going back and forth with these A and D chords. I mentioned to her that it reminded me of Bad by U2 (which has similar chords as well). We had been discussing the idea of starting to do a few covers here and there. At the time, we had sorta decided against it but we thought this was a good opportunity. By making a medley of T-Shirt Generation and Bad, we sorta killed that bird as well. Basically, we decided to use a sizeable chunk of Bad as T-Shirt Generation’s chorus. And it works pretty well. We never really played it much in Launch Pad but, when we were going through Launch Pad songs for possible porting over to Third World Sun, Scotty remembered the lines, “God isn’t dead. He just hasn’t flown in awhile,” and pushed for including it. At the time, I was trying not to sing a lot of songs Lori used to sing, for several reasons. One, it just didn’t always seem right to me to do songs that were so much her personality (and less mine). But there was also the fact that her range was higher than mine. Now, my range has stretched more and I can hit a lot of notes I couldn’t hit then. So, we decided to give it a go and we like doing it (when I can remember the words to the U2 part). We don’t always do it live and we sorta consider it a bonus track on the CD because it’s not totally our song.  We’ve never made a cent off of it though, so I suppose we’re okay from a legal stance. Owing U2 money would be a great problem to have.