“Spotlight Girl,” off J. Van Cleave’s full-length debut, Lights On, starts with these great stomp-claps before the bass drum kicks in–they fade into the background through the first verse, but get you in the groove right away.
Van Cleave had the chords and melody for the song in mind but was hitting a roadblock on lyrics. “I remembered that my uncle had sent me some old poems of his that he has written in college,” he says. “So I went back and browsed though some of them and stumbled upon Spotlight Girl. It really seemed to fit with what I was writing about at the time so I changed a few things and added some of my own lyrics to round out the song. Not only did I really like what he was talking about in the poem, I thought it was cool to use something that had been written by someone in my family years ago.”