She Wants to Cuddle
- Jason Buchanan
- May 3
- 2 min read
This song was birthed during a car-ride home from our trip to Arkansas in April 2025. We were probably half way home on our second day of the travel, stopping somewhere in Nebraska.
We'd gotten fuel (and snacks) and were back on the road, when we saw ducks in a pond on the side of the road. I must've said something like "Oh, look at the ducks!" And my wife, Hope, responded, "I'm as docile as a baby duck". And the game was afoot.
Clearly, my wife is not docile. After we laughed about this for a long while, we began thinking of how to write a song where all the lines rhyme with the *UCK ending but the final payoff doesn't cuss. Instead, when the final line is sung, "She wants to...", there is a long pause allowing the audience to scream the expletive while I sing the lyric "Cuddle".
I've performed this song in a church (once) in Laramie, WY and at the Songwriter's Guild at Atlantis Lounge in Portland, OR. Who knows where it will turn up next? The first take (demo) of the song is shown below (recorded in the den of our home in Cheynne, WY):
This song felt playful and irreverent in a way unlike the majority of my catalog; and because I wrote it with my wife, Hope, I strongly considered it for an upcoming album/EP. As of this writing, we haven't found the right time or collection of songs for it, but the demo still holds onto hope for workup and release, one day.
Unused Lyrics:
The lyrics are already provocative, but here is an unused segment that took it a step further. This set of lyrics felt like it took away from the underlying momentum of the song, so I removed it. Still, it was a funny true story that I remembered as I was developing the song:
I once knew a girl in choir, her name was Amy Fuchs
She was German and they spelled it weird,
“F” “U” “C” “H” “S”
I bet even she and her husband of all these
Years with a hyphen between hers and his last name,
“Johnson-Fuchs”, surely he understands how it feels, when…
More behind the scenes.
This is another song that came to fruition in a day or so. Here is a snapshot of the voice memos from April 2025:
The "Ba Ba Ba Ba" recording is probably the best representation of how the song sounded before lyrics:
The melody is still largely intact from this first instance, though refined. I also like that Nathan picked up this motif on the fiddle in the final recording (as of yet).
With Scott Mulvahill on upright bass, Jacob Schrodt on Drums, and Nathan Leath on fiddle, this version of "She Wants to Cuddle" feels nearly complete (but not quite):
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