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SANDEN TOTTEN: Quillan and Kim Roe are in their living room with their instruments on their laps. Quillan has the lyrics to Afternoon Song out and, he looks pleased.

QUILLAN ROE: You came over Tuesday night. We read it a bunch after you left again and then didn't have any ideas, and it still was looking just like, oh, man, what have you got ourselves into? And then I woke up Wednesday morning and the song was all in my head. Just like that.

KIM ROE: So by the time I got home from work, he said, I've got it. I've got it already.

QUILLAN ROE: [LAUGHS]. It was pretty happy.

SANDEN TOTTEN: Roe says, a few years ago, all of his songs came to him this way. They just appeared in his head, almost fully formed.

QUILLAN ROE: I felt like I wasn't even writing them. I was just a conduit for them. And I would wake up in the morning and there would be this song with the words and the melody and everything, and then it was just my job to put it down on paper. It was a great period of creative juiciness.

SANDEN TOTTEN: But eventually, it passed. He's learned to push himself to write songs even when he wasn't feeling so inspired. But sometimes he gets lucky, like with this melody.

QUILLAN ROE: [VOCALIZING]

SANDEN TOTTEN: Next, he added the banjo.

[BANJO PLAYING]

Roe says nailing the chords and melody helped a lot, but he's far from done.

QUILLAN ROE: I remember the other part of that writing style is, OK, there's the burst of inspiration. There's the thing that just comes out of nowhere. But that doesn't mean that it's this perfectly formed thing. I mean, it still needs to be worked on.

SANDEN TOTTEN: A lot of that work involves Stephen Burt's lyrics. Roe has been struggling to fit them to his melody. But he's hesitant to make any cuts. He says before he thought they were too cheery for his tastes. But now he sees them differently.

QUILLAN ROE: The more I work with this song, the more I read it, and the more I sing it, the more I feel what I got a glimpse of when you first showed it to it. There's this underlying melancholy, but Quillan and Kim Roe don't have time to dwell on lyrics. The Roe Family Singers have a weekly gig at a neighborhood bar, and they need to get their song ready for their next performance.

ALL: (SINGING) Check the sun. It's all alone with--

QUILLAN ROE: Oh, Crap, that's wrong. "Check the sun. It's alone and blue." That's what it is.

(SINGING) Take a blade of grass between--

SANDEN TOTTEN: That's Quillan and Kim Roe doing their version of Afternoon Song. And for our project, Larissa Anderson's been shadowing the band, The Owls. And Larissa, is here with me now. Hi, Larissa.

LARISSA ANDERSON: Hi, Sanden.

SANDEN TOTTEN: So, Larissa, how's the songwriting process been going for The Owls?

LARISSA ANDERSON: Well, for Brian Tighe, who's one of the songwriters in the band, he usually gets the song started by recording a bunch of quick ideas. They're like musical sketches. And for this project, here's what he first came up with.

[BRIAN TIGHE, "AFTERNOON SONG"] Take A blade of grass between your teeth

Take a walk to the bus stop, wait a while

See the driver coming up on 1,000 miles

Then he tried something else, like this bossa nova number.

[BRIAN TIGHE, "AFTERNOON SONG"] Take a walk to the bus stop and wait awhile

And that just wasn't working.

BRIAN TIGHE: It felt a little forced. It felt like, oh, this is going to be hard.

LARISSA ANDERSON: Tighe had also just learned how to play God Only Knows by the Beach Boys. So he tried writing a song in a similar chord progression.

BRIAN TIGHE: But I realized like, literally, it would be a 15-minute song. I thought everybody would hate me.

LARISSA ANDERSON: The next day, Tighe listened back to all the versions he recorded, and there was something that struck him about his first burst of song. But he said it felt a little too obvious.

BRIAN TIGHE: I didn't want it to be all happy major chords, which this verse was. The thought of these minor chords came in.

(SINGING) Take one, take two, and then take 10

Take five, take six from 11 and then

(SPEAKING) And that felt like a nice musical counterpoint. It felt like it made sense with some of the different emotions going on in the song, this kind of looking back on youth.

LARISSA ANDERSON: Some of the lyrics were more challenging, like the line that starts "crisp pollen interference patterns." And even though it was a stumbling block, Tighe still found a way around it.

BRIAN TIGHE: I just kept thinking '60s psychedelic with those "crisp pollen interference" patterns. That really, really was the impetus for the break. then.

(SINGING) Crisp pollen interference, patterns like a crowded pool

See nature starting up or shutting down. It's summer school

LARISSA ANDERSON: But ultimately, there are just too many lyrics to deal with. So tomorrow, we'll hear what happens when Brian Tighe brings his song to the band. Chris Roberts is here with me now. Hi, Chris.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Hi there.

LARISSA ANDERSON: How is Matt Wilson's song coming along?

CHRIS ROBERTS: He's doing OK with it. When I first handed him the lyrics, he was crestfallen. He didn't feel like they were words that he would say or sing. Since then, I think his feelings have deepened somewhat, but they've become a little more complicated.

MATT WILSON: I feel like there's some magic in there and some dross.

CHRIS ROBERTS: What does that mean?

MATT WILSON: I think it's an alchemy term, and it's the part that's not magical. It's part that's just like slag.

CHRIS ROBERTS: For Wilson, the wordy lyrics and their lack of rhythm are the slag and dross in Afternoon Song, which he wanted to change right away.

MATT WILSON: In this case, I thought they needed to be turned into lyrics.

CHRIS ROBERTS: To do that, Wilson slashed a number of words from the lyrics, violating one of the project's main rules. He changed several lines, trimming here, chopping there. He even cut out whole groups of words, such as the now infamous phrase "crisp pollen interference patterns." Wilson says he had to edit them to be able to sing the song. He says if songs from scratch were a competition, he would have followed the rules more strictly.

MATT WILSON: But it doesn't seem like it's really a competition. It seems like it's more of a chemistry experiment or we're looking like scientists at this process.

CHRIS ROBERTS: The song started coming together after Wilson got rid of what he considered the excess verbiage.

MATT WILSON: I thought of the melody for "take a blade of grass between your teeth right away."

(SINGING) [VOCALIZING]

CHRIS ROBERTS: And the chanty line that goes something like, "Take one, take two, take three," that became Wilson's chorus. Wilson was also able to resort to his bag of tricks, which he says, contains about five tricks. It happens in the line leading into the chorus, which goes--

MATT WILSON: (SINGING) Fifty fifty, it'll go our way

(SPEAKING) And it's got basically this 1/10 grade chord progression that I just can't lay off of.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Despite all the work he's done, Wilson still doesn't feel any attachment to the song. He likes playing it. But he doesn't think it'll wind up being anybody's desert island pick.

MATT WILSON: I felt like I like, put the lyrics together in the best way that I could put them together, and then I put a really nice sharkskin suit on it, and there it stands. And I'm not really sure if there's any substance there.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Wilson says Afternoon Song is finished for now. He says he'll sand the edges a little, maybe throw in some piano filigrees and see what the band he's assembled adds to it when they meet in the studio. With Larissa Anderson and Sanden Totten, I'm Chris Roberts, Minnesota Public Radio News.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MATT WILSON: This is my happy filigree part.

[MUSIC PLAYING]