I was in a band for several years with Louie. We lived together in Portland for a few years, and periodically we would play what we called the songwriting game — often with Bubba Hollenhorst, who incidentally is our guest songwriter for this coming Monday. To play the songwriting game, everyone makes up a few song titles, and then you write them down and draw one out of a hat. Then everybody has an hour to write a song for their title, and in an hour you reconvene and play them for each other.

This song originally came out of that game more than 10 years ago now. Someone wrote down “Settling” as a song title for the songwriting game, so I used it as an excuse to write a coming-of-age song while using as many references as I could to the board game Settlers of Catan.

I wrote it to be played on the guitar with Kari and Gabe playing violins on the chorus, but recently I’ve played around with it on the piano, and it turned out very different but still recognizable. So, here is Settling, version 2. I’ve included a live recording of the Big Ideas playing Settling at the Banana Stand back in 2010 as well, in case you’re interested in comparing it to the original.