After growing up in Ramsey, a small town in New Jersey, we moved to New York to try to make it in music but found it a very difficult circuit to break into. Bars would let you play because they wanted your friends to buy drinks, but then they’d kick everybody out to get the next group in.
Whenever I would meet people, I’d tell them, “I’m a waiter but I play music,” and they’d go, “Yeah, so does my cousin.” The prospect of playing somewhere like the [iconic New York venue] Mercury Lounge felt about as likely as playing a stadium.
I wrote Ho Hey about these experiences. I had the beginnings of another song that was going to be called Everyone Requires a Plan, but it had no words or melody. Once I started strumming it again, Ho Hey just poured out of me. Looking back, I was writing about two heartbreaks at the same time. A person had recently broken up with me and I was also leaving New York and moving to Denver – breaking up with the city that I thought held all my dreams. I felt steamrollered by both events.
The opening lines are me trying to convince myself that striving to become a successful musician was a noble pursuit: I had been “trying to do it right” and “living a lonely life”. The hook is pure defiance: you might have broken up with me but “I belong with you, you belong with me”.
