Sometimes you need to give a song space. This one needed literal space—the drafting process shifted from my pocket notebook to the much larger B5 cahier. The switch to bigger paper let me complete the song almost immediately. There was a gap for verse 3, and a pre-chorus line I wound up cutting the next day, but rewriting and reordering longhand has a lovely way of clarifying which ideas matter.
The song itself is destined for Posthistoric. I guess it's a pandemic love song? As much as anything I write is a love song right now?
The title, "Neowise," tells you when I started drafting this (though I did not know until just now, when I found that link, that NEOWISE is actually an acronym, so I guess I'll be capping it from now on). The comet's visibility coincided with my recovery from the kitchen accident that removed a tiny part of my left index finger; I was still playing guitar around a bandage when I wrote the pages on the left. Thus the "scissor off my fingertips" line in the bridge. I am, as you may know, deeply phobic about hand trauma. Despite that—or perhaps because of it—this is my favorite bridge in a long while.
The recording isn't done on this one yet. We tend to get a lot of arrangement ideas spontaneously in the rehearsal room, and being apart is slowing that down. But I like where it's going.
The title, "Neowise," tells you when I started drafting this (though I did not know until just now, when I found that link, that NEOWISE is actually an acronym, so I guess I'll be capping it from now on). The comet's visibility coincided with my recovery from the kitchen accident that removed a tiny part of my left index finger; I was still playing guitar around a bandage when I wrote the pages on the left. Thus the "scissor off my fingertips" line in the bridge. I am, as you may know, deeply phobic about hand trauma. Despite that—or perhaps because of it—this is my favorite bridge in a long while.
The recording isn't done on this one yet. We tend to get a lot of arrangement ideas spontaneously in the rehearsal room, and being apart is slowing that down. But I like where it's going.
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