Hey Everybody,
It's hard to believe that as of today it has been 9 months since "I Am Undone" came out. But as it is here we are. We have been writing a bunch for our next full length which should be out next spring. We have also been focusing our creative efforts on a couple other huge projects. Mainly Jesse and Jeremiah's weddings. They both occur within the next month so keep them in your prayers.
Also i wanted to give a little commentary on one of the more overlooked songs from "I Am Undone". Our Little Girl was actually the second song we wrote for the record but was the last song to recieve lyrics. After finishing 10 other songs lyrically we knew there was plenty more to say but couldn't figure out where to go with it. Jeremiah asked if i had ever thought of story telling in a song since it was something i had never done. We talked a lot in particular about Pedro The Lion's "Winners Never Quit" EP as this is still my favorite example of storytelling in rock and roll.
Jeremiah had a vague and creepy idea come immediately of the top of his head about a little girl showing her parents a picture she had drawn at school. As they look at the picture they realize that much about it is a disturbingly gruesome interpretation of reality. This picture proves to pull a lot of buried issues in this family's lives to the surface and unravels all of the lies and false pretensions they have been trying desperately not to deal with.
This made me think a lot about the burden of bearing someone else's joy. No person can make another person happy. Only God can fulfill us. But so often we expect others to make us happy and this is a burden that almost always results in the death of the relationship. Eventually it grows into a poison that kills the relationship.
But this outline didn't feel like enough info to write a song about so we called in one of our good friend Kent Walter. Kent is one of my best friends from college, an absolutely brilliant writer, and one of a small handful of guys that are truly unofficial members of this band. Kent took our description along with a couple of scenes from the book "The Great Divorce" (one of my all time favorite books) which has a lot to say on the subject. He sent me the first draft during our first week in studio and then surprised us all by flying across the country to hang out in studio. We finished the lyrics together. The song itself doesn't actually tell the story but is based completely on it. So take 5 minutes and check it out. I have added it below and definitely think it's worth the time.
grace and peace,
the boys
Our Little Girl - by Kent Walter
“Look what she drew today.” She brings a picture into the room and he looks up.
The picture is mostly simple. Oranges and browns, the bumps and dips
in the paper accented by gaps in the wax. The colors are not true.
Reds, yellows. Single lines for long fingers. The people are all posed
on the paper, a few of them wearing adhesive smiles, pasted under
Wood’s expressionless Midwest eyes. Their hands are a knot of lines,
holding each other. The house behind them is a modest afterthought, the
childish freehand of its lines bleeding into the figures dominating the
foreground. The grass is drab, the roof slanted on the top, making the
house itself look off balance. These details are seen through the eyes
of a childhood, and they do not reflect reality. In nearly every spare
space is an object, scribbled with aimless scratching that makes it
impossible to make out exactly what the thing is. These could be
objects, or they could be mistakes, hastily covered.
Green shoots are climbing in the front of the house. They’re
standing, dominantly tall, on the necks of blue and golden flowers,
choking them. The disarray is nothing like the real beds of flowers in
front of the house. These weeds are not reaching up and taking hold of
the house, pulling it down to join them under the soil.
“Look, the trees are gigantic, too. They make the house look tiny. Look at the apples…”
They are swollen, bloated on the tree. They have grown large, but
they will not fall. The tree’s branches are hanging on, and the fruit
has grown too large, stayed too long. It is rotten on the branches, and
it still will not fall. The tree is sagging toward the ground as if
it’s drawn, but it will not let go. This is also untrue, and reality is
much different, the tree nourishing its growth, standing tall in front
of the even house.
“I think this is me and you here.” She’s pointing to a pair of
figures that are looking straight ahead. There is nothing to
distinguish them from the other figures on the page, all of which look
identical, single black lines on white paper.
They look, and as they do, the faces in the picture begin to speak.
Like the rest of the picture, the voices say nothing that sounds like
reality. The house is falling, they say, in spite of their best
efforts. The weeds are winning. The earth is hungry, and everything has
forgotten how to fly. The figures in the foreground turn to look at the
dozens of others behind them, and these figures pull themselves slowly
from the page and begin to tell their stories, none of which are true,
because they cannot be.
“They’re… us. They’re all us.” He can’t look away.
The slow, empty figures calmly walk away from each other, toward and
over each other. She is here, at a stake, lighting the tinder herself.
He is a ways away, carrying a doll by its hair, stacking the doll on an
altar of others.
Knives. Huge, grinning teeth, dripping black wax on the page. In the
middle of the page, they are there, holding hands, looking everywhere
else. The figures spell out everything that would have brought an end
to this house and all of the lives in the picture if it were reality
and not the drawings of a darkly imaginative young girl. Every block in
this tower they have built, every sacrifice, every effort has been a
gift without a sender, an orphaned deed, unattached to love. They have
held back absolutely nothing but themselves, they confess, and this
destruction is not the way it is really ending.
“All of this should have been enough.”
The picture between them says all of this. There are dozens of figures.
She is sacrificing her body again, clutching another burnt bone to put
with the other relics she has collected for so long. He is carrying
another doll by the hair; she has the torso, and they’re walking apart.
He is turning a blind eye as the flames lick the shavings at the foot
of the stake. The teeth of his empty smile are grotesque, leering,
sharp. She is putting drops of poison into her respect and submission. He
is doubled over from the exertion of climbing up his altar to continue
building it higher. Hands behind backs, bodies bleeding, faces smiling.
A last creaking lurch of lumber, and the house is finally gone, the
ground flat and finally, truly, undisturbed by its memory.
CHECK OUT www.kentwalter.com