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Stephen Ziel knows a thing or six about songwriting. A member of legendary Milwaukee band Pet Engine, Ziel has done more than his fair share of scribbling and scrawling during the course of his career. But the writing recipe that led to the song we’re premiering here had a few ingredients you don’t find very often.
There was interstate travel. There were strangers-turned-collaborators. There was a serious time crunch. In the end, Ziel emerged with “Wide Awake” for his Chrystal Gales project — a journey of a song that starts sullen and ends absolutely soaring.
Before it was anything, however, there was just Ziel, Gail Ann Dorsey and Sam Lyons sitting in a room in Memphis. They had pens, paper, instruments and 150 minutes on the clock. What they didn’t have was any prior working relationship.
This was all part of the Goffin & King Foundation’s most recent songwriting retreat, held in June 2024. The idea is to use the formula laid out above and, as Ziel put it, “pluck an original tune out of thin air.” He ended up in good company: Dorsey is an accomplished session musician and for nearly a decade played in David Bowie’s band, while Lyons is a fellow Wisconsinite and award-winning musician doing his thing out in Los Angeles.
“For whatever reason, (a team of scientists are still trying to figure out why), the personalities of these three, skill sets and influences matched up perfectly,” Ziel shared, “and in 2-1/2 hours this song was written — music and lyrics — and arranged in the exact form that you are hearing in this recording.”
Putting aside the time constraints, it is quite a composition on its own merits. A layered intro settles into a melancholy couple of verses that seem to point toward an unhealthy relationship, with Lyons singing on lead vocals, “All the stones you’ve thrown / I don’t know how much more I can take / No more bones for me to break / I’m wide awake.”
But there’s a real turn at the chorus, with the music spinning into a sunnier outlook mirrored by the lyrics:
Living this feeling
I picked my heart up off the floor
And started healing
You won’t be stealing anymore
Stronger without you
The light is brighter than before
I see my future
I have the choice of any door
Following that brighter tone, the three songwriters slowly turn up the dimmer switch as “Wide Awake” rolls along. There’s a mini-fist-pumping bridge, a saxophone solo and the real coup de grace: a key change just before the last chorus.
It’s tough to walk away from this one without at least a little smile at the corners of your mouth, so make your day a little better and hit the “Listen” button at the top of the page. You can also catch “Wide Awake” on 88Nine today at 6:30 and 10:30 a.m.; and 2:30, 6:30 and 9:30 p.m.
