Skyscrapers

So I have it.

The album I mean.

Things We Would Rather Lose.

It's mixed and mastered and locked and loaded... The mastering job was worth every penny... I don't know how to describe the difference between the final mixes to the mastered product... we've listened to it a couple of times since Friday on a couple of different sound systems and... I really just don't have words to describe it. I've blogged a lot about it over the... well, it's crazy to say, but it's really the culmination of almost two years...

I started writing it, I guess, right after (or maybe even while) we finished the first Paper Arrows record... and it was written over most of 2007 and into early 2008... and we started tracking in summer 2008... and now... it's done.

It was originally conceived of as a double album called Skyscraper Hearts... I had 25 songs for it... it was going to be split into a loud record and a quiet record. Jay, thankfully, pushed it more towards a conventional record.

We picked 11 out of 25 and wound up recording 9 songs... some of the songs we left off are really really good... I don't know what I'm going to do with them, but I should do something. But where this project wound up... this particular collection of songs and the way we recorded and mixed them... It just feels like it couldn't (and shouldn't) have been done any other way... it feels right to me.

We really made it our mission to attack each song in whatever way we thought best... so we brought in different musicians including horns... we used different sounds... we had a bigger budget so we were able to record and mix all of it in studios, as opposed to Look Alive, which was tracked in the attic...

I could write about so many different things with respect to the final product... about the performances, about Jay's production, Manny's mix... each time we've listened there's been a new thought, a new angle, a new sound... and I love that through all the different sounds, the styles, the instruments... it is a album about recovery from loss and the lyrics are the thread that connect the sounds... and that diversity of sound, the eclecticity is the perfect way to describe, to convey how complex recovery is... jarring, disorienting, positive, negative, relieved, angry, sad, numb, confused, clear headed... all of those things... and they're all there...

The next steps are playing this House of Blues show on Thursday, and then getting to work on press for the release of the album... which is April 7. I've kind of put writing on hold until I heard the final product but... I anticipate now my mind will be free to start figuring out what comes next... And that's really the question...

I wrote an album of songs that were about loss... losing someone.

I wrote an album of songs that were about recovering from losing someone.

So what happens after you've recovered?

Because... I think I have. Some of the bits of writing I have done seem to be about what I've found in the recovery process... about faith really and not faith in god, more faith in people and love... So maybe that's it...

The one song I have yet to examine here is Skyscraper Hearts. While I'm glad the album is called Things We Would Rather Lose... the original title was Skyscraper Hearts for a reason... I knew I had something special with this song... it was one of those mysterious songs that just kind of... pours out of you... you know what you're writing about but it's something more... it's beyond the concrete thing about which you're writing...

The recording of Skyscraper was incredible... from the killer horn arrangement, to the guitar part Jay and I created on the fly... to the vocals, half of which were recorded on the very last day before mixing, and half of which were recorded on the very first day, the scratch track day...

It's almost too perfect in how the performance even surrounds the recording... listening to the demo version of me singing along to an acoustic guitar part in a tiny little isolation room... and then listening to the final product, which is one of the biggest sounding things we've done...

The phrase Skyscraper Hearts had been turning up here and there in my writing back into probably 05 or 06... it was one of those situations where you have an idea or an image but you don't have anything to which to attach it... it doesn't mean anything more than the words... so it just sits until you experience something that gives it meaning and significance...

And that something to me was the gut wrenching personal loss of separation and divorce... as well as meeting and connecting with someone who had gone through something just as gut wrenching if not more so...

And seeing and feeling what loss does to one... and level of despair to which it can push you... and how you fight to rebuild... and... I could try to write more on it... but maybe it's better to just let the words speak for themselves...

SKYSCRAPER HEARTS Your eyes They fall Upon the ground Your tears They crawl Upon my cheek We rise At night And breathe the starlight We rise At night As big as the sky And time is never there And time is never fair We dream Of empty rooms And moving trucks We wake To find That it's all gone They beat In cages Filled with silence They beat These skyscraper hearts Of ours And time is never there And time is never fair The light It comes when we are falling into dust The light It shines from where the buildings fall into a sea Of love It tries To drown us in our waking lives When in our hearts we're running out of Time is never fair And time is never there And time is never fair And time is never there

jbg