Track #1: Broken Bow
This is the first installment in a series of 10 posts talking about each tune that’s on the record and giving a little bit of background on them. I’ll also give the chord progression to the tune if anyone wants to play along at home. There’s a player in the upper left of this page. I suggest you give the song a spin while you read about the making of it. I hope you enjoy.
Track #1
Broken Bow
I remember sitting in front of the television and I feel like it was the mid-term elections in 2006 but it must’ve been earlier than that. The way the song came to me was me holding the G chord that starts the song a bar longer than I thought to, so that it catches the D almost on a backslide. There’s something about that transition that set the mood for the rest of the song. The verse flowed naturally into the chorus. Again, just sort of came to me. I remember my wife was sleeping in the other room while I watched TV on 83rd Street.
The way I write songs, if that’s what you call it, is building the chords then the melody and playing with the words right up until the final moment. So I didn’t have words for it for a long time. Or final words. I could always make something up. But there was a weekend upstate where we first demo’ed it and I put some pen to paper to try and get to something real. My ideas tend to fixate around death and desire and so, correspondingly, the lyrics that took shape took on the perspective of a stalker or a hunter or someone that was obsessed with someone and the way that they thought about their prey. Kind of sick, I suppose. The target was ‘on the run’ so to speak and hiding out.
Originally, I was thinking of a hotel between Charlottesville and Harrisonburg on 64, a road I drove a lot when I was in school and when I was running my record label. So the first line originally was “You’re hiding out, in a motel on 64″.
I like how the words play with perceptions of reality and artifice, however, and how certain things, like obsession, can be so powerful and true and real to some people. The point the narrator makes is that his desire is more real than all of the false things and acoutrements that people cover themselves with. The second verse brings this home. Here’s the words:
These citizen smiles
They don’t know me
Or how I want youMy secretive styles
Well, I trust them
I trust their wisdom
He’s saying (I suppose I’m saying if I’m not being so pretentious) that the smiles of pedestrians and the common man, the falsehoods and the pretense, those things aren’t real. They’re illusion and imaginary. But the real things are things we know. Those are the only things we can know. Put another way, maybe you don’t exist. But I know I do. That’s sometimes all we can know.
I remember demo’ing that song late at night and when we added the organ and the piano line and played it back on the monitors and it was in the woods and everything and the creatures were out there in those woods. It felt dark, and broken hearted, and sinister, and quite beautiful. That demo was where the piano line came from and it made its way through the recording process and remains an essential part of the song.
I liked the song so much that, as I was thinking about how to get it out to people, I decided it was going to be the first tune that I sent out through my then fledgling email list. My email list is still pretty small but then it was handled through Gmail and I didn’t use a mail management system or anything like that. It was kind of the first announcement that, after the non-release/recording of the first Lipstik record, there were going to be more tunes and more things to do and I was going to be keeping in touch with folks.
This song is a special tune in the sense that most people that heard it, even the demo, seemed to have understood it right away. This was a demo I sent to Nelson and Bill at Team Clermont and they responded really well. And this was the first song I sent Paul. He wrote right back and said, “Let’s do this one!”.
So when we started talking more about the album, Paul and I started with ‘Broken Bow’ and got into it. The original structure was four stanzas in the first verse and then into chorus but Paul felt like it took too long to get there. So we shortened it to three which felt unnatural to me (and still does a little bit) but I like getting to the point in general so I grew to appreciate the brevity. The problem was that 64 in the first line rhymed with the second stanza “I watch you undress, through the window, through every door” and if it was three, to preserve the rhyme scheme, I needed to change one of the lines. At least, I felt like I had to.
So I ditched the 64 line and shifted it to “You’re hiding out, in a motel in Running Bear.” I have no idea what Running Bear is/was but it felt, to me, like a small town somewhere on the road in Wyoming or the Dakotas, somewhere near Twin Peaks, I suppose, and it was this old roadside motel with a flickering neon light, etc.
Once we got the structure right, including those three stanzas instead of four, we took it to the studio in March 2008 to record it during the days that we recorded all of the other tunes. The most memorable happy accident during the recording process was the transition into the bridge where, by happenstance, we froze as we were playing it, maybe because we didn’t know it that well. But that pause created these beautiful dynamics as the rest of the music moves in like the tide and the accident caused by not knowing the song became a lasting part of it.
Over the next few months, we brought in Rob Burger to play some pump organ on the song and Gerald Menke to play some pedal steel. Paul also used some sampled mellotron and piano sounds to create some atmosphere and wash out the descending piano line. I think both he and Amber sing on it as well. It’s Paul’s voice quavering in the background during the bridge that makes it so especially haunting. Another great moment.
I think I’ve said this but this is probably my favorite song that I’ve written. It’s not my favorite moment of recorded music that I’ve been a part of (that honor belongs to Hold My Heartache) but I think it’s the stoutest strongest tightest and most durable piece of songwriting I’ve done. I mean durable in the sense that it stands up to many interpretations, feels ageless, feels, dare I say it, a bit epic.
It has this curiously dry Western quality to the recording and the dryness of my voice inspired the genre for the record “landscape pop”. It feels like you’re sitting cross-legged in the desert, watching the sun paint the mountains gold and crimson as it threatens to rise, and the rest is indigo and black and deep violet like a Rothko painting, and there’s a cold dry wind blowing through. That’s what it feels like to me at least.
If you’d like to play along at home, the chords are:
Verse: G-D-Em-C Chorus: F-C-G, Am-C-G Bridge: G9-C-Am-G
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All_Knowing
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guy misterioso
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theflyingchange
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theflyingchange
