Some songs change your life because of what they say. Others change it because of what they teach you. “Kiss Me Goodbye” did a little of both.

This is one of the most important songs in my catalogue, and the second-oldest I've chosen to record for this project. I wrote it in early 1987, at the ripe old age of 16, after I'd been learning piano for approximately six months. It was also, in its own way, the beginning of the end for my band.

At the time, we were a working hard rock/light metal band in the rural Pacific Northwest. A typical bar gig meant four one-hour sets, usually with one original song sprinkled into each. I was the group's only songwriter, and everything I'd written up to that point was firmly planted in our musical territory: heavy, riff-driven, and loud enough to terrify small mammals.

The problem was that those songs sucked.

Really sucked.

But sometime in January or February of 1987, a glorious accident occurred. I was practicing piano and hit the wrong keys. What came out was dissonant, but also hauntingly rich and full-bodied. It was gorgeous. I had stumbled onto a minor sixth chord, and I immediately became obsessed with the sound.

Years later, I would joke that I use sixth chords as though they're about to vanish from the earth and I'd better use every last one while I still can. This is where that started.

From there, I began experimenting with increasingly colorful harmonies, trying to incorporate these strange, beautiful chords into compositions that still had recognizable melodies and coherent phrasing. Naturally, one discovery led to another: suspensions, augmented chords, and just about anything else that could add musical color without completely destroying the melody.

The result was “Kiss Me Goodbye,” which contains as many sixths, ninths, suspensions, and augmented chords as can reasonably be stuffed into a single song without violating the Geneva Convention.

I was thrilled. The band was considerably less enthusiastic. When I played it for the guys, they looked at me like I'd grown a second head.

Here we were, playing songs like AC/DC's “You Shook Me All Night Long” and Judas Priest's “Heading Out to the Highway,” and suddenly I show up with what is essentially a piano-driven country song.

The questions came immediately. How are we supposed to play a piano song onstage? If you're playing piano, who's playing the strings on the synth? Have you been smoking that stuff you got from Paul again?

And they weren't wrong to ask.

My keyboard at the time, a Korg DW-8000, couldn't produce anything resembling a convincing acoustic piano – or strings for that matter. Fortunately, I had what seemed to me an entirely reasonable solution. We could simply haul my mother's baby grand piano around to our gigs and hire a string quartet to accompany us.

Problem solved.

To my considerable surprise, the guys reacted as though I'd grown a tail to go with my second head.

“Oh, obviously,” I recall the guitarist chirping. “And afterwards we can do a polka.”

My mother wasn't particularly enthusiastic about the proposal either. And so “Kiss Me Goodbye” was shelved. In retrospect, I can't blame them. It doesn't exactly flow naturally after “Welcome to the Jungle.” But something far more significant had happened than the rejection of a single song.

My entire approach to songwriting had changed.

Suddenly, I was interested in harmonic complexity, orchestration, and arrangements that went well beyond the capabilities of a conventional five-piece rock band. The songs I was writing were becoming more sophisticated, more ambitious, and, at least to my ears, considerably better.

Unfortunately, they were also becoming increasingly difficult for the band to perform. So while I was writing music that I genuinely believed represented my future, I was still standing onstage playing the stuff I'd written when I was fourteen and fifteen.

Combine that frustration with my titanic teenage ego, and you have the ingredients for a fairly spectacular collision. Eventually, I reached my breaking point.

I told the guys that I wanted to stop playing covers and bar gigs altogether. Instead, I wanted us to perform two-hour concerts consisting entirely of original music. And because the arrangements were growing beyond what five musicians could reasonably reproduce, we'd occasionally need to bring in additional players.

To me, this was the obvious next step in our evolution. To them, it probably sounded like I'd just informed them they were being demoted to Scott Mallett's backing band. Things got pretty damned spicy after that.

Looking back, I understand their reaction far better than I did at the time. I was asking them to abandon a successful working arrangement, take considerable risks, and follow a creative direction that was increasingly my own. I didn't fully appreciate how unfair that might have felt.

At sixteen, I was responding to ambition, frustration, ego, and the intoxicating realization that I'd discovered an entirely new musical vocabulary. I knew where I wanted to go. I just hadn't given enough thought to whether everyone else wanted to come along. There were other nails in the coffin after that, but those feathers have already been plucked.

As for the recording itself, what you hear on Track Zero is remarkably close to what I originally composed in 1987. The two principal changes are that I replaced the original piano solo with a slide guitar solo, and I no longer sing the song an octave higher.

Apparently, some things really do change in thirty-nine years. But the composition remains essentially intact, complete with the harmonic experimentation that started this whole business.

“Kiss Me Goodbye” matters to me for several reasons. It was the first song I wrote that I still consider reasonably good. It marked a fundamental turning point in my compositional style. And it set me on a musical path dramatically different from the one I'd been following.

Whether that path was ultimately better or worse is a question I suppose everyone involved might answer differently. But I know one thing. If I hadn't hit those wrong notes on the piano one afternoon in 1987, I might never have discovered the songwriter I wanted to become.