The last track is called “The Silence.” This song is one of the songs I wrote – popped out of bed at one in the morning – it felt like I kinda had to get this thing down, and really, it’s a prayer to God. It’s God talking to me, God talking to my daughter, and then ultimately at the end, the finale is me praying over my daughter.
That song was there, but without that last minute and a half, two minutes of the song, it doesn’t hold the same weight as it would. Catherine just continued to kind of say, “I don’t feel it yet.” She couldn’t ever give us specifics about what “it” was, but she was just basically like, “I’m not jumping up and down yet,” which was so wildly frustrating, but she forced us to just keep going and I’m so happy she did, because we ended up getting this crazy outro that then led to this ability for me to have space where I could write this kind of last, final prayer/poem for my daughter to close out the record, and it was sort of this perfect circle to begin the record and end the record with this conversation. It was really great. By the end, by the time it hits you – hopefully it does what we were intending, which was, ya know, it knocks you, knocks your face off.
“The Alien” is “a narrative about a small slice of time in a man’s life as he faces a lofty decision with a dire consequence. It is ultimately about family and the effects, big and small, that family has on everybody.
I wrote this song in Hawaii, celebrating my wife’s 30th birthday I was inspired to write two of the saddest songs I’ve ever written. Not sure why it came out that way. This song was a full-on story that was writing itself, I knew where it started but as I was writing it, the the story was just happening – I didn’t know what was happening until the third verse, like a detective novel.
The Gold” was the last track written from the album. It is sung from a woman’s perspective. It was the final piece to the record that we were missing. The song takes place in the early 1900s in the mining town of Lead, SD.
Andy - “In getting to know Catherine on our first few calls... you first want to trust people, and we're trying to figure out if she knows what she's talking about. And then, she's trying to figure out if we know what we're talking about. And finally when both sides are started to understand the workflow of how we did trust each other and everybody was actually in it for the right things, and it's just like learning how to communicate again with new people and especially an intimate setting like making a record. You’ve never met somebody, you talk on the phone a couple times, and then you do talk for three days, then you're starting the record, so that's that's a whole other kind of experience.
At the end of the day, Catherine is just like an unbelievable talent, and the record sounds so great, you know, on headphones or wherever you listen to it. She did a really incredible job.”
This is the first song that I wrote for my daughter as a lullaby for her from her perspective. She was 2 ½ weeks old when I wrote it in between when she was napping and I went outside to my deck to my house. I truly never anticipated it to be anything other than what it is.
The line “First of a thousand to write on the wall” represents the first of countless songs I imagined writing for my daughter. She recently drew on the walls of our house and blamed it on the “lyric in daddy’s song.”
This song was originally and roughly formed a few years ago, about the impending weight of the future; it almost made it onto Black Mile, but hadn't fully formed yet. We spent some solid time this year revisiting and reworking and recording the song into its final state. I found it inspiring to work on this song right before the birth of my son, which was and is beautiful impending weight.