Seven Years Dreaming

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.

OK, I feel like I need to start this post with a little disclaimer. It might sound as though I’m taking our BODY of ARTISTIC WORK very, very seriously. That isn’t the case. What we’ve written isn’t Shakespeare, and it doesn’t require a study guide to be enjoyed. Having said that, I love (love!!!) to play with words. And when I’m listening to new music, I delight in digging around in the lyrics, looking for connections and shades of meaning and moments of artistry. I’m writing this post because I’m betting I can’t be the only one. Joe is also a valuer of words (and a writer and general smart guy), so we worked hard on crafting our lyrics into something worth playing with, and I’m hoping that they will find their way into the hands of people who will enjoy them. Therefore, please hear the following information less in the voice of a pretentious professor and more in the voice of an excited artist who can’t help but share some of the background of the project she’s enjoyed so much. Deal? All right, then…here are a few hints for those who are interested in pulling apart what we’ve written.

1. These are not our own stories.

I mean, they’re ours in that we created them, but they’re not generally based on our own lives. Sometimes we’ll use our own experiences as a jumping off point, but by the time we finish, very little of our work is autobiographical. So if you’re looking to dig into the relationships and conflicts we tell about, you’ll have to look in the songs themselves for details–our life stories probably won’t help you.

I was surprised, incidentally, at how freeing it is to write this way. It not only makes the songwriting process a little safer (for example, my husband doesn’t ever have to fear that our own less-glorious moments are going to find their way in front of an audience in some dramatic ballad), but it also removes all storytelling limitations. We can explore any relationship, any event, any intriguing set of circumstances that catches our attention, not only those we’ve walked through ourselves.

2. Look for a specific or unusual angle.

You don’t have to go far to find a song that basically says “I want you,” or “I love you,” or “I lost you.” And far be it from us to say that those aren’t worthwhile stories to tell. But we’ve really enjoyed digging beneath the surface of those most-common storylines to find a scenario or perspective that we haven’t heard before. We often come back to the question “what if” as we write. Yes, he’s lost her, but what if he doesn’t understand her even when she’s not lost? Yes, she wants him, but what if there’s been an unspoken understanding between them for years and they’ve never acted on it? Yes, she loves him, but what if she tends to profoundly overthink everything? As a result, we’ve ended up with some complex characters of whom we’ve grown genuinely fond. Keying in to the peculiarities of their stories will help to shed light on why we like them so much.

3. Watch out for unreliable narrators.

Our characters, like real people, cannot always be believed. They are sometimes self-deceived, or deceitful, or manipulative, or simply wrong. Don’t take everything they say at face value.

4. We like layers.

In writing the songs on this album, we always got excited when we landed on lyrics that had multiple layers of meaning. OK, I got excited. I’m the excitable one. But even Joe would grin. One example that comes to mind is in the middle of verse two of “Never Went Back To The Moon:” “But who should be sorry? I cannot speak for you.” On one level, the narrator is expressing his inability to understand the woman’s perspective–he doesn’t want to impose his interpretation of their history on her. On another level, though, even asking the question implies that he might think no one is to blame. And on still another level, it’s pretty ironic, as he very much IS speaking for her. This is not a duet, and while the song paints a picture of a conversation happening over coffee, we never hear her thoughts directly. All we get is his monologue. Layers!! These make us happy.

There’s more to say–there is always more to say–but I’ll leave it there. Our hope is that if you are a words person (and if you are, we like you already), there will be enough lyrical substance in our songs to create some satisfying moments of exploration and discovery for you. And if you find a few words or lines that become your favorites for any reason at all, we would love to read about them in the comments below!

I have really fond memories of writing this song. It is one product of the late summer afternoon we think of as the day this all sort of started. We spent it sitting in my family room with a guitar and a rickety digital piano propped up on two-by-fours, scribbling lyrics in a spiral-bound notebook. At the time, we’d been dabbling in songwriting for a couple of years, but it had been a slow and unsteady process that hadn’t borne much fruit. This day, though…Joe came in with a couple of ideas for hooks to begin with (which is our normal MO), and we managed to get traction on like three songs in one day with results we really liked. It was at the end of that day that we realized we might actually be on to something.

I just now scrolled back through the voice memos on my phone and discovered that I have a 38-second clip that we recorded that day so we wouldn’t forget how the chorus went.

The hook Joe came in with for this song was the first line of the chorus, so we built a story around it. (Who’s singing? Why are they asking the title question? What’s going on between them?) And honestly, I sort of love where it landed. The narrators in this story, the couple facing the “hard times” referenced throughout the song, are struggling, but they’re optimists. Finding themselves in a relationship that has not turned out the way they expected, they face the same choices we all face in that scenario: do they bail on each other, coast in a chronic state of dissatisfaction, or dig in and hope for change? They unapologetically choose hope.

Here’s the thing, though. It’s deeply optimistic, but it’s grounded in a realistic assessment of their situation. The first verse makes that clear:

Every day it seems a little harder to cope
Hanging off the edges at the end of your rope
Finding that you’re sliding down a slippery slope with me

(Worth noting: their assessment is unexpectedly empathetic. This is his acknowledgement of her struggles alongside his own.) And so it’s not that their eyes are closed to their reality–it’s just that they refuse to abandon each other in the midst of that reality, and they believe that it can be better:

We’re taking on water but we’re not going down
‘Cause I’m not giving up until we turn this around
If anything is worth it it’s the love that I found in you

The question in the title, then, isn’t cynical or accusatory, but an honest expression of solidarity. It’s not “what did you think this was, you idiot, a love song?” But rather, “Did you think this was a love song? Because I did. That’s totally what I was expecting.”

I think my favorite thing about this song, though, is the way it plays with cliché. This couple, we decided, came into their relationship expecting a fairytale romance, buying into romcom/Disney stereotypes. They were looking for a life that was, in many ways, a cliché, and therefore they haven’t done much reaching beyond cliché in the way they relate to each other. So we opted to lean into that dynamic and filled the verses with rhymey clichés in rapid succession. Both the above excerpts reflect that effort, as does this in verse two:

Maybe it’s time to wear my heart on my sleeve
How ’bout we admit we were a little naïve
But I’m a believer and I want to believe with you

I like that last line in particular. “I’m a believer” is so slickly happy, and you expect it to resolve in “I want to believe in you,” but she (this ended up being her verse) changes it to “with you.” It’s still cliché, but you see her moving toward something new, using the language she has at her fingertips to envision a new reality in which they are not adversaries or even just objects of each other’s love and affection, but actual partners.

You can find the full lyrics here if you’d like to take a look.

They have a long way to go, this couple. They’re going to have to walk a hard road of learning to relate to each other and their world in new ways, and they’re going to have to acquire new language to do it. But they are committed to one another, and their confidence has not been swayed by the storms that have threatened to tear them apart. Their optimism in the midst of their struggle and their determination to cling to each other make me happy. And in the end, the final line of the chorus gives me great hope for them. Maybe this messy, real-life conglomeration of conflicts and dreams is more of a true love song than anything we find as the credits roll on a Hollywood love story. This doesn’t look like a love song the way they expected it, but maybe it is one anyway.