This one actually started with a Facebook post. One Sunday afternoon, while we were taking down sound equipment at the church where we have both played and sung for the last couple of decades, Joe told me about a post he’d seen that had left an impression on him. In it, a friend of a friend was reflecting on the dynamics of her relationship with her father. She commented that if she had spent more time putting out small fires when she was younger, it might have made a significant difference in the long run. “That’s an interesting image,” said Joe. “I bet there’s a song in there.”
Betting he was right, I spent the next several days mulling over the idea. We’ve all been in places where it feels like we can’t move forward because we’re stuck managing a string of emergencies. It can be frustrating even if the crises we face are tiny ones. And if they aren’t…well, that can get seriously unnerving. With those ideas in mind, I put together the first verse and chorus of the song roughly the way it stands now, recorded it on my phone using a Diet Pepsi bottle cap to tap out the tempo on a patio chair, and sent it to Joe. We worked on the rest together.
One interesting thing about the way this song landed: despite its cheery sound, it’s actually way more bleak than most of what we write. Joe and I are both pretty strong optimists, so even when we write about struggle and conflict, there’s usually some kind of undercurrent of hope. This song, though, is about an increasing sense of panic, and if there’s an undercurrent, it’s dread. Maybe that’s because we were trying to be true to the emotions of this moment in the narrator’s life. It may all be ok–there may not actually be any giant blaze ready to burn the whole place down–but she doesn’t know or feel any of that at the time.
There’s one lyric we debated right up until we recorded it. In the bridge, the speaker says she “stepped in to play the hero.” We wondered whether that should be “to be the hero” instead, and I remember discussing it one last time in the studio, when I was already wearing headphones and standing in front of the mic. We decided to leave it, though, because it adds a dimension to her character. She’s in over her head–she thought this was going to be an easy (and perhaps flattering) win, and she got way more than she bargained for.
One last thing. We wrote this song several years ago, and now we’re preparing to release it on Election Day of 2020. Back when we wrote it, we had no idea how deeply appropriate it would feel to this moment in American history as we wade our way through a nightmarishly contentious campaign cycle, a global pandemic, widespread social unrest, and, quite literally, wildfires all over the western states. It feels like we are collectively living the story that this song tells. It’s a little eerie, honestly. Here’s hoping that we soon find ourselves in the place of the original Facebook poster, reflecting on these small fires as a distant memory…and that we will have been able to put some of them out.
Check out the full lyrics of “Small Fires” and hear a clip of the song here.
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