Amplified In The Silence (Original Demo)

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.

“Yeah I still want to know each part, know each part of you.”

Each Part

This is a love song to my wife, but it is written with many different perspectives. Similar to The Grocery, we are time traveling in this song.

No Ears

“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.

“Can you hear me? What’s your name?”

It’s Amazing

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.”

I Know How To Speak (Original Demo)

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.