More on TWWRL

Can you believe it's almost December... almost the end of the year? Wow... And as if to remind us... I'm looking out our picture window at a perfectly dreary nearly December winter sky which is purported to hold 3 to 8 inches of snow... Of course.

After a great Thanksgiving full of friends, family and food, it feels like a sprint to 2009... I'm still waiting on the final mixes and masters of the album, but we've managed to sort through the results and put together a song order... so I've gotten the ball rolling on the packaging design and the release plan. I know I sound like a broken record with this, but in looking over the 9 tunes that comprise the album, I'm so taken by the cohesiveness of the lyrics... without really making it a priority, we wound up with about as close to a "concept record" as I could imagine ever being part of.

Some of it is obviously that all the songs were written in a fairly narrow window of time... so of course there are lyrical threads and themes that run throughout the 9 we selected and recorded... But it seems like it turned into something a little larger and more significant than just common themes and common words.

And the magnitude and scope of it crept in a bit as I sang the vocals, but really not until I looked over and settled on the song order of Things We Would Rather Lose... which is:

More Things We Would Rather Lose One More Quiet Song Til I Couldn't Cry Crystal Skyscraper Hearts How the Heart Moves On Almost Gone Explosions Below

The thing that got me... was putting More upfront as the lead track. Putting together Look Alive taught me how important a first track is to the perception of an album... I mean, I knew how important it was before but it wasn't until I lived with that group of songs under the name When You Left for a few months and then settled on Look Alive with a new order that I really got how different two orders of the same songs could be... Same with Things We Would Rather Lose.

Once we settled on it as the first track, I went back and looked closely at the lyrics of More to see what they would tell the listener about what was to follow (i.e., the rest of the album). I was more (heh) than a little surprised to find that More functions almost like a topic sentence... that all the other songs fit into the thematic framework put forward in More... like, it's almost spooky.

More was written in July and August of '07, in the midst of the very end of the divorce. So I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise that it acts as a topic sentence for an album that is about picking up the pieces from loss.

More has a couple of features that I'm really proud of... a couple of things that I've never been able to pull off previous to writing it. First, it starts immediately with vocals and has the chorus up front... something I've admired in other songs, but for some reason have never been able to pull off. Second, it has some slight time changes... nothing drastic, but just a few little variations that keep the listener interested. Third, it has a few small lyrical variations in the chorus... this is probably the most important feature from a thematic "topic sentence" standpoint...

MORE Can you leave the ghost behind Breathe the kindness That echoes to tomorrow Beneath the easy sorrow That's bleeding into blame It feels all like someone Gave more than is good Gave more than one should More and more I'm starting to believe Would you say your skin Covers up an ocean of waiting Of falling without end Would you say your sky Has broken into pieces and pieces Of unrelenting blue Can you leave the ghost behind Breathe the kindness That echoes to tomorrow Beneath the easy sorrow That's bleeding into shame It feels all like someone Gave more than is good Gave more than one should More and more I'm starting to believe Would you say you dream Of embers in the ashes Exploding into someone's perfect flame Would you say you pray That into every loss Some life and some love are going to come Can you leave the ghost behind Breathe the kindness That echoes to tomorrow Beneath the easy sorrow That's bleeding into gray It feels all like someone Gave more than is good Gave more than one should More and more I'm starting to believe More and more I'm starting to believe More and more I'm starting to believe ********

So the thing that really got me upon further thought, is the slight lyrical variation in each of the three choruses... the sorrow bleeding into "blame," "shame," and "gray." I remember I was really proud of this when I wrote it... it struck me that it perfectly summed up this progression in grieving over and dealing with loss... where you kind of go through these phases of being sad (sorrow), angry (blame), ashamed (shame), and finally just numb (gray as it were).

Now... over a year later and in a completely different place emotionally than I was when I wrote it... it resonates even more (heh again). And I also see that every song on the album falls into one of the three categories in the song: blame, shame and gray.

Which is totally by accident... well, not by accident, but... not a conscious feature. I wasn't thinking that when I wrote and when we picked the songs... I was just writing what I was feeling, which happened to be these three different phases of grieving. As I was looking at TWWRL it struck me that there weren't really any songs that represented sadness or sorrow... and then I realized that Look Alive was an album full of them...

Look Alive was sorrow and TWWRL is the sound of sorrow bleeding into blame, shame and gray. And that... it pretty damn cool. And I can't wait for everybody to hear it...

jbg