The Story Behind the MINTEER song Never Give Up
Unusual story about this song, Never Give Up, released in 2025 as the first song on the album, Never Give Up When To Quit. It all started about eleven years earlier…
Around 2014, I bought an inexpensive electronic keyboard at Costco, with my fun money, just for the heck of it – not sure what I was thinking. The very first tune I created on it was a catchy two-handed riff that I was especially surprised with, since I’m not a trained pianist by any means or an experienced keyboard player at all. But this weird tune just came to me as I was messing around with different sounds and jamming around, an instrumental song I was to call The Jungle Zoo. I recorded it with a single microphone in front of the keyboard’s speaker, just so I wouldn’t forget how it went. A crappy recording by any means, but it was never intended to be a production (this early recording later ended up on the MINTEER compilation album, Get What You Expect in 2021). Although there was something catchy about it, I figured this was just another draft song idea.
Over time, I still dug the overall groove of The Jungle Zoo well enough that I started writing lyrics for it. Since I felt that a vocal version should obviously be called by a similar name, lyrics that seemed entertaining and fitting would be about a bunch of partying jungle animals. Maybe half way finished with the lyrics, I played the rough draft for my kid Lain. He was not amused. I shelved it. Of course, I should have thought twice about shelving it, since Lain was probably too young to appreciate it and he doesn’t really like most of the music I like anyway. But I have many draft songs started over the years, now collecting e-dust, and I haven’t felt a need to re-visit them. Maybe I should.
By the time I was working on the Calling All Aliens album a few years later (started in 2016, released in 2017), I looked at the lyrics of Jungle Zoo once more and decided the song might be a perfect fit for the album. I finished the lyrics easy enough. But the tricky part of recording it, my first thought, was in trying to mimic the original keyboard-only riff using just guitars. You see, I’d foolishly returned that keyboard to Costco soon after purchasing it, being a real cheap skate and deciding I was wasting my time and money with a keyboard since I’m no match for any keyboardist nor really care to be. So, to help with those catchy riffs I found a sax player and they did a superb job with all the licks. And I blended guitar parts with the sax. The lyrical version was simply called, Jungle Zoo, and was track number seven on the Calling All Aliens album. I was pleased enough with how it came out, and could never imagine any other version of Jungle Zoo than this one. This was it. The drummer on that song told me he thought the song’s overall vibe sounded like the Rolling Stones.
Something more must have been destined for Jungle Zoo. In 2022 my cool wife bought me a midi keyboard, more like a mini synthesizer. After playing around with all the many groovy and righteous sounds it could make, I realized that it would be a perfect instrument to re-record the original instrumental version of The Jungle Zoo. So, I attempted to record all the parts, using the synthesizer, exactly how they were on the original keyboard recording. And I added new synthesizer layers throughout along with a new catchy “middle eight” section. The main “middle eight” parts had come to me, I vividly remember, while driving Lain to school. The deep synthesizer bass parts I’d added gave the whole song such an oomph that I knew I had to have a real drummer add some talent to do it justice. James Knoerl had played a bunch of tracks for me already by then, so I was very glad he was available. In honor of the original keyboard track, I named it the same The Jungle Zoo. I was, and still am, quite proud of it. It was released as a single in 2022. James’ playing is awesome. I thought I had outdone all prior versions of the Jungle Zoo, including the vocal one.
Fast forward a few more years. Though I was always proud of that recent, full blown synthesizer version of The Jungle Zoo, I began to feel that it could have (and should have) benefited much more with some lead guitar parts. Lead guitar has been my passion since I was a young pimple-faced teenager, when I bought my first electric guitar at a pawn shop in Florida for twenty bucks. I was so obsessed with lead guitar and rock music from that era that guitar solos became my proud trademark in nearly every song I’ve ever recorded since. But on The Jungle Zoo I had been lazy, not a surprise I suppose. Apparently, others felt that The Jungle Zoo could use some more something as well. A friend who had listened to it not long after I recorded it replied, “and…?” And in 2025 Lain actually sat down to listen to it with me. He said it needed something more.
Okay, I finally got it and thought, so take action you big dumbass. Keeping all of the synthesizer and drums from recent The Jungle Zoo exactly as-is, retained as the punchy framework underneath, I simply added a bunch of ad-libbed, random electric guitar riffs throughout most of the song, letting my muscle memory fingers do the playing and not taking it too seriously. After letting the new parts sink in a bit and taking a brief pause in recording more guitar bits, while doing dishes one night one of those newly mistaken riffs I’d just recorded kept playing through my head until finally I thought, oh yeah that’s it – that needs to be the main theme on this song. So, I went back and added that guitar riff theme, and similar supporting bits throughout the entire song. In the end, I couldn’t believe how much better this version of The Jungle Zoo was – and completely different sounding than the prior synthesizer and drums version. So much different than the original song, in fact, it really needed a new name because it had truly become a new song unto its own.
After I’d finished recording this newly evolved track, I was inspired with surprising energy to put together an entire album, based on a number of things including another to-do list item of mine to compile all of the songs in which that cool dude James Knoerl kicked ass on drums. A lot of the guitar licks on this album are inspired by many of my heroes. For example, I’d been heavily listening to the Scorpions and Uli Jon Roth for many months prior to this time, everyone should do it, and had made a point that I wanted to very soon record some guitar stuff inspired by Uli Jon Roth. And that is what unintentionally or unconsciously got scattered throughout this new album (though surely far from Roth’s level of playing). During this same timeframe Lain and I had talked about an odd saying, “Never give up, but know when to quit.” Seemed like something cool for my new album. That’s how the title “Never Give Up When To Quit” came about. Lain said the first and last songs on the album should be derived from the album title. So, “Never Give Up” was what I decided to name the re-vamped jungle zoo song. Never Give Up became the first song on the Never Give Up When To Quit album. There is so much about all the songs on the album, but I’ll stop boring you here.
Dan Minteer
Minteer 