Kendra’s pictures
What inspired the album?
The passing of a lovely neighbor of mine who took the most beautiful landscape and nature photographs that were filled with light.
Was there a specific feeling that you were trying to elicit in listeners?
A feeling of light and of beauty that transcends our mortality.
Do you have an interesting story about the songwriting or recording process?
This is a very simple song and after I recorded the vocal and acoustic guitar I thought we’d make very quick work of it. Boy was I wrong. We experimented with all kinds of different tempos and feels and I just wasn’t feeling any magic. We tried slowing it down and doing a simple trio of acoustic, upright bass and fretless. We tried a piano motif, a synthesizer motif. Then we tried a harmon mute on a trumpet. We tried a kind of rustic Spanish version. We took a Paul Simon approach with pizzicato strings doing rhythm. We tied just guitar and vocal. We tired four different approaches to bass. When it was paired down, the story was very clear, but it wasn’t very interesting musically. When we added instruments, the story kept receding into the background. It was when we asked Marc Muller to try a lap steel that it all came together. It gave the song an other-worldly feeling that the story was calling for. It was big without suffocating the negative space we needed for the lyrics to come through.
What are three descriptors/adjectives that best describe the emotion or melody in this song?
Uplifting, ethereal, hopeful.
Do you have a favorite lyric from this track that you’d like to highlight? Why is that significant to you?
“It’s a funny little thing, lilacs are supposed to come in spring, but here it’s mid-November. There’s pretty little blooms two seasons too soon saying maybe she ain’t really gone.” Kendra’s house has gorgeous lilacs in front of it that bloom in early May. I walk by them every morning and stop to take in the clean, beautiful fragrance. And the rest of the year I wait for them to bloom again. But after she died, they began to bloom in November, in the frost! It was very super-natural. That just NEVER happens.
How do you feel that you’ve grown as an artist since your last release?
The recordings are getting prettier. They keep sounding more and more like my idea of a record.
What has the song taught you or what do you take away from it?
Experimentation is fun and worthwhile.