A first version of this song (sporting the main riff) was written in June/July 2013 in Redwood City, CA. That version was ostensibly about my daughter, who was going through something of a phase at that time. But that version wasn’t good enough as a song to make the album. Besides, by January 2014, I already had a song about BOTH my kids (“When You Were Kids”, also on this album) and so didn’t need another…certainly not on the same record.
So…I kept the title (“The Choices You Make”) and main riff and ditched the rest. In February 2014, I wrote new music and words one weekend, after re-reading Tom Stoppard’s play “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”, which I had studied at A-Level at Reigate Grammar School, some 30 years earlier. The title lent itself to an examination of choice…and who in the entire canon of western literature struggles more with choice than the eponymous hero of Shakespeare’s Hamlet? It’s basically a reading of that as an existentialist text; a contemplation of suicide.
I played the original riffs by picking on a Rickenbacker 330 and then did guitar over-dubs on a Rickenbacker 360 12 string. But when William heard the results, he felt the guitar parts were too similar. So he put the second guitar on with a delay effect. He also played the guitar solo. The current version is the result.