postcard from the studio, day \sum_{n=0}^\infty 2^{-n}

We’ve been in the studio for about three days straight—I didn’t step outside for any of the 20 hours I was awake yesterday. Not advocating this as a lifestyle. You can take the kids out of Silicon Valley…

Around 5:30 a.m. this morning we finished recording St. Stephen’s Cross, a song that I wrote last fall but never played live. I remember working on it at the Grand Opera House in Wilmington, Delaware, sitting at the piano onstage between soundcheck and showtime, noticing that small pink balloon of pleasure that always appears when you know something has been born. You might still make adjustments, and you don’t know what other people will think of it, or even what you’ll think of it yourself the next day…but it exists now, a fully formed creature with a pulse and its own set of fingerprints.

I already knew then, actually, that the song didn’t work as a piano-vocal sketch. It was a framework for a bigger production; the vocal and piano lines were designed as anchor points, with as-yet-unimagined sounds swirling around them. I never used to write like this. Songs were words, chords and melody, built to stand alone without fancy studio tricks. But I’ve been leaving space in the writing these days, seeing what comes along to fill it in the arrangement and production phases. It’s nice to have the luxury of experimenting this way.

St. Stephen’s Cross

He was there the night the wall came down.
He lost her in the endless crowd,
in the shadow of St. Stephen’s cross.
He sent cries aloft for his fellow man,
his fingers slipping from her hand,
the rain clouds prowling overhead.

She was there the night the wall came down.
She faded into that newborn crowd
like a warning of what could be lost.
Through the perforated night she ran,
her fingers slipping from his hand,
and she breathed in freedom
before daylight tread.

They were there the night the wall was drowned
in the surging of that tidal crowd:
an old world made new
on the same holy ground.
She found him standing, looking lost
in the shadow of St. Stephen’s cross,
and he closed his eyes and heard no sound
but her breathing warm against his mouth.