Tony Cummings spoke to Nashville's DAVID DUNN about his 'Yellow Balloons' album

David: I was unaware how common the story is. "Yellow Balloons" is the only song I specifically wrote about a tragedy that happened in my family. Two and a half years ago my older sister - she had two little girls, a two year old and a four year old, and while I was in Texas playing a show I went to visit them before I was going to sound-check. They went down for a nap, and the two year old didn't wake up from the nap. There's really no scientific explanation for why that happened. "Yellow Balloons" was my attempt to capture what we're still going through.

Tony: Were you always going to use that song for the album's title?

David: Yeah. Even before I had figured out how to finish the song. It was the most difficult song for me to write. I didn't mean to write all the songs about Heaven or little kids; that happened naturally, the way that I write. I almost always write about things that are just happening to me. 'Yellow Balloons' is getting a snapshot into my existence the last two years; most of those songs I can give you the story where they came from, the moment in time when something happened to me to make me write that song. So it shouldn't have surprised me, but it did: once we'd picked the songs I was like, 'Oh my gosh, this is an accidental concept album!'

Tony: Have you had much response to the album yet?

David: Yeah. I'm shocked at how common the story that inspired the "Yellow Balloons" song is. Fans reached out and said, 'This happened to me: my little kid died.' A lot of it is people looking for support. I didn't know what to tell them at first. I had to go on a hunt to figure out where to send people that were crying out to me. That to me is the most jarring response to the record, and not something I expected; I probably should have, but it's not something people talk about regularly. I didn't even know that I knew a bunch of people that had experienced loss with a younger kid, but it happened tons - way more than I was aware. That is the response that has surprised me the most. There's some people from my hometown that I went to high school with that I got a message from the other day. I was unaware they had lost a one and a half year old.

Tony: I suspect you've written lots of songs over the years.

David: Yeah. My computer is absolutely chock full of reject songs. Whenever we plan on starting an album, I tend to write five songs for every one song that goes on an album, so it tends to be 50 that I'll actually pen before we put a record together. I'll write the songs and whether they're decent, bad, good that determines how far I go in the creative process. If they stink, they may just end up being words on my computer. If they're OK it might be a tiny demo. If they're good, I'll do a good demo. That's the progression. So depending on how well I think the song was written goes parallel with how much effort I put into the demo, or how much of the residual song is remaining.

Tony: What comes first, the lyrics or the topline melody?

David: Yep, they both come first. It changes from song to song. A lot of times I write them independently of each other and try to squish them together. That's what I do most commonly, but there is no rhyme or reason. Sometimes I'll do them at the same time; sometimes I'll write a whole bunch of poetry and try to write a song on top of that; sometimes things'll just start coming out of my mouth when I'm trying to make up melodies. I don't have an instruction manual that I follow: it's different almost every time.

Tony: There's a lot of tweaking that can go into a good song.

David: There is - a lot of tweaking. You could also argue - I'm going to say that I'm about 70 per cent on board with this - that good songs are inside of you; sometimes you can tap that sound, sometimes you can't. Your job as a songwriter is to make it possible to tap the sound. I've spent eight months messing with a song, and other times it's taken me 30 minutes, and I'm done, and I'm never going to mess with it again. I do think that perspiration is 90 per cent and inspiration is 10 per cent, but because it's more like being stubborn - that sort of perspiration - continuing to write and write and write. It takes a whole lot of willpower.

Tony: Did you have a set amount of time in the studio for 'Yellow Balloons'?

David: "Yes. Every record I've done, it'll just be me and one other guy, Josh Bronleewe. We'll sit in the studio behind a computer and co-produce. We've been doing this since we were 20 years old. That's partially because I'm a control freak: if you hire a bunch of session people, and other people are doing programming, the project gets away from you. I need to do that at some point on a record, but I have yet to get a whole bunch of other creatives on a record. So we'll sit behind the computer, and I'll play everything. With the tweaking and messing with the album over and over again, that absolutely ended up being the case, but I think we only went about a month over. We had a four month block to make the record, and I think we went three weeks past our date. Tinkering is a really difficult thing to stop doing: you can tinker and you can change - 'This snare sound needs to be tweaked a little bit' or 'There's something going on with that banjo' - and you can indefinitely go on tweaking and tweaking and tweaking. To be honest with you, I kind of like to tweak, so it's the worst of both worlds: somebody has to come in and stop me.

Tony: Is Josh involved in gigging the songs?

David: No. Back when I very first started, Josh came out with me for about two months. I released a terrible record I'm not even going to give you the name of - the very first thing I ever put out. We did a run, a college tour; it was more like two weeks. He's a married man, a songwriter and record producer in Nashville; he's a worship leader too, so he stays pretty busy.