"Everybody Loves Jill"

photo: Anna Bezrukov

John Thomas Griffith of Cowboy Mouth: ​About the song "Everybody Loves Jill"…

In the mid '90s this lady named Jill Allemand started working for our manager. She's still a really close friend of ours. We were recording in a studio in Los Angeles and she had just moved there.

She would come to the studio and hang out. We'd talk and chat at lunch. I'd be playing my acoustic guitar in the kitchen and we'd talk. 

Out of the blue, I said, "How's your love life now that you're here in LA?" 

She said, "Oh, it sucks. I can't get any dates and the ones I do get, they're lousy."

I started singing, just out of the blue, "Nobody loves Jill. Nobody loves Jill." She laughed and said, "You make me sound so pitiful." 

So I changed and started singing, "Everybody loves Jill." 

She said, "Now you make me sound like a whore." 

I was like, "Jeez, I can't win here."

But I just started doing "Everybody Loves Jill" in the chords that I had, those three chords. I was singing it to Jill and making it up on the fly. "She's got a red light…" I was thinking of The Police song "Roxanne" and "You don't have to put on the red light". It conjured up all these images in mind. I just said, "She's got a red light, she's got a red dress, she wears a red coat," whatever. I just made it all kind of goofy. 

The producer walked by the kitchen and said, "What is that?" 

I said, "Oh, I'm just goofing around." 

He goes, "No, I like that. Sing it." I went through a verse and the chorus with him. It was more of a goof than anything else. He said, "Write a bridge for it and we're going to record it." 

I'm like, "What?" 

I was just goofing off and it's become one of our biggest songs. It's amazing. 

I need to goof off more, I think.