trespassing raze we were talking about the thorn bush we were botanists in disguise i was hoping you'd break me open wring the saltwater from my eyes 140902 ... raze why did i only leave the last few lines of the song here? that's like only sharing the end of a dream with someone who wasn't there to see it born. here's what happened. in the fall of the year i wrote this blathe, steve came over with some chords, a few vocal melodies, and an idea. something about a guy who'd barricaded himself inside a decrepit old house and the woman who wondered about him. he wanted to see if we could get natalie to sing the part of the good-natured voyeur. and he had a title: "trespassing". so there was a concept and a skeleton. but there weren't any words. i set up a few microphones to record our acoustic guitars and we played through the half-formed haze of a song that wasn't written yet. he improvised words and not-words. i did my best to harmonize without knowing what the hell he was singing. i introduced a bit of harmonic friction with my playing and ripped out a solo just past the four-minute mark that was more confident than it had any right to be. it was a moment i would never be able to replicate. later that night, i sat down and listened to the rough demo. a few lines stuck out. they felt like solid building blocks. i got inspired and wrote a pile of my own lyrics to go with them. the whole thing took on a darker hue when i was fleshing it out. started to sound like maybe there was some history between these two characters. maybe the woman wasn't just curious about someone she didn't know. maybe the man was a ghost haunting his own house. maybe that explained why the place had gone to seed. maybe it was a sad kind of love song, with the two of them singing to each other from opposite sides of life and death — his memories of whatever they shared eroding in a sort of death beyond death, hers as clear as the day they were made, both of them wanting to connect but not knowing how. i recorded a second demo at about four in the morning sitting cross-legged on my bed, singing into the tiny microphone hidden in my macbook's abdomen. then i sent it to steve. he didn't mind that i pretty much hijacked the song. he liked what i did with it. i sent it to natalie. she liked it too. when she came in to record her part, she showed up with the whole thing memorized. she'd absorbed the song to the point that having the lyrics in front of her threw her off. she just closed her eyes and went for it. her voice gave the whole thing a great little kick in the heart. she altered the vocal melody just a little, rising up at the end of the word that gave the thing its name instead of dipping down the way steve and i did when we were singing that part ourselves. kind of like one of the freed flowers i wrote into the narrative, stretching to see the sun. that closing verse is still one of my favourite verses of anything i've ever written. it feels like it brings things full circle without resolving anything. there's this weight of sadness. but there's a little bit of hope tugging at its sleeves too. maybe that's why i put it here. 230828 what's it to you? who go blather from