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The StoryIn short, "The Hillbilly Soliloquy" is the song that birthed Standard Deviation. That's why Fred and Frank chose it to be the opening song on Abnormally Normal or Normally Abnormal?

Fred had written all of the verse and chorus music for "The Hillbilly Soliloquy" (all of the music up to the drum fill before the line "So I'm sitting in Denny's") in 1994 before moving to Hollywood to attend Musicians Institute. However, he had not been able to come up with any lyrics for it. So, after he started classes at MI and began jamming with his fellow students, he played the chords for various guitarists while they improvised lead lines. To a person, they played rock solos and filled the chord breaks with impressive flurries of sixteenth notes. Then, one day, after a country guitar class, Fred found himself jamming with Frank. He played the chord progression, and Frank rocked along as the other guitar players had. However, when Fred reached the first chord break, Frank played a doublestop country guitar lick. At that moment, Fred knew he had found a like-minded guitar player -- a player who was willing to approach music without regard for artificial stylistic boundaries.

Despite Fred's growing excitement about the song, he was still having trouble coming up with lyrics for it. He couldn't seem to get a handle on what the song was about. That changed one night, though, when he attended a show at The Troubadour. A girl he knew from school literally bumped into him while dancing to the band, and, suddenly, the line, "I saw Sally the go-go dancer at a club the other night," popped into his head (incidentally, the girl's name was not Sally, and she was not a go-go dancer). That line quickly blossomed into a fictional Hollywood underworld scene, and the song suddenly had a lyrical focus. The only small item of concern left to resolve was how to reconcile the Hollywood story line with Frank's country guitar lick.

At school a few days later, Fred and Frank arrived early for their music theory class. They found a Blues Listening class concluding in the room they were about to enter, and they heard the teacher playing an old blues album as the students departed. Fred and Frank heard the artist on the record sing, "I ain't superstitious, but a black cat crossed my path," and Frank, in a moment of silliness, parroted the line to Fred in an exaggerated country accent. In a flash, Fred knew the line belonged in the unfinished song. However, while it fit in well with Frank's guitar lick, it was worlds away from the sordid Hollywood story that opened the song.
Fred finally devised a way to merge the country and Hollywood elements into a cohesive tale when he remembered something he had witnessed while eating at Denny's on the Sunset Strip on a Sunday morning. The restaurant had been filled with people from all walks of life -- families dressed for church, people heading to work, tourists, people who had been out partying all night, punks with multicolored hair -- and everyone had been eating and talking when a woman strode past the front of the restaurant clothed solely in a tee shirt. As she had passed, it had seemed that everyone in the restaurant had noticed her and stopped what they were doing to watch her stroll by. That incident, coupled with the variety of people patronizing Denny's that morning, provided Fred with the raw material he needed to connect his disparate lyrical threads.
Fred finished composing the remaining music for the song and wrote the lyrics for the final verse (about the pan handlers, street preachers, addicts, and mentally ill people who roam Hollywood Boulevard). At the same time, he charged Frank with writing the lyrics to the part of the song Frank was going to sing -- the actual hillbilly soliloquy. When both musicians completed their tasks, the song was finished, and Standard Deviation had emerged as a functioning entity.