Track eight of Inchoatery – trying and failing to move on, and the instinct to just tear it all down.
When I was doing most of the initial writing for the album, during the first week of February, I didn’t know exactly how the arc of the narrative would bend. Whether it would turn out to be completely redemptive, or vindictive, or tragic, or what: that was up for grabs even as I was trying to get most of the narrative plumbing for the first two thirds of the album in place.
And so I wasn’t sure where this song itself was going when I started writing it. The first stanza came into my head while I was walking around the neighborhood and I knew I had a jumping-off point, but it took a few days to figure out where go with it.
Ultimately, the song is about trying to get back on your feet, and about getting ahead of yourself. Emotional reach exceeding grasp. The end of the song is a sort of catharsis of rejection, the idea that when getting over it isn’t working out the way one hopes the alternative is to just destroy everything that might be evidence of that failure to let go.
I brought in some more acoustic instruments for the start of this track in an effort to change up the sound of the album temporarily; the bluegrassy implications of the banjo and acoustic and upright bass, with a touch of washboard (which I don’t really know how to play or record well yet) hits on a sound I’ve enjoyed for the last several years but which wasn’t really otherwise applicable to the album I had in mind.
That same instrumentation shows up two songs later, on Rewrite, and in terms of execution I think it’s done a bit better there, actually. But for the sake of a tonal changeup I think it does the job here, and being able to come back around to it after the big solo break in this song makes for a nice formal symmetry.
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