I Forget How a Conversation Starts

The birth of a "Different Story"

I’m not sure there’s a greater way to love than to listen. And yet, it tends to be the first faculty that breaks down when we are afraid.

The curious thing about a ‘release day’ for me is that I’m often so far down the road the song prescribed me to take when I wrote it, that to try and look back and see it clearly is to search for some shadowy form that is less a thing and more a lived idea now. But, it is new for everyone else, and with some mental flexibility, I can pretend it’s new for me too. Imagine hearing it for the first time again, like the day I wrote it.

More and more, I am searching for ways to make my songs like intimate conversations. I hope people listen to my music in headphones because it’s usually the way I listen to my songs as I make them. I am placing sounds in various spaces to create a deliberate orientation as each sound introduces itself. I’m hoping that my voice will reach into the listeners ears with a kind of directness we don’t get when we just talk normally to one another.

There are times in my closest relationships when I can’t express myself with spoken word. I turn to song in these moments. It’s like I have access to a more evolved version of myself — that version of me is more prone to self-reflection and a softer approach, or if she’s explosive she does it with brass samples, angular synthesizers and metallic percussion instead of reaching for household objects, much healthier.

I get to house my feelings in sound and that always feels like the place they prefer to be.

The instinct in this song is to reach out and toward the person I loved deeply at the time I wrote it. It was my way of inviting him to talk and vowing to make myself available. There were things going on in his life that were bigger than me. I wanted to admit to the ways I had been preoccupied by my own suffering and put them to the side to hear his story. It was important the music felt as intimate, pending and earnest as the lyrical sentiment. Like a hovering bird that keeps trying to land. Or an opening hand that closes by a reflex then attempts again to unfurl.

The demo started humbly. A laptop, an iPad, an SM7 and an interface.

I wrote down in my Notes app what I wanted to say. The less decorative the better. It could have been a text. These are my favourite lyrics to emerge, the ones that feel commonplace and like they’ve been baked into an everyday exchange but when presented alongside melody they take on a different kind of weight.

I miss you from across the Southern Ocean
these days I’m a little worse for wear
thinking bout your care and your devotion
and too many times I was too rushed to hear

You’re never quick to anger quick to harsh words
Yeah I’m learning and unlearning all the parts
Got so used to reacting out of past hurts
That I forget how a conversation starts

So let’s talk about the way that your heart’s so worried
Lets talk about the cancer in your fathers body
Tell me how she spun you out, let you down and never said “sorry”
Your pain is my pain with a different story

Here’s the first demo I made.

When I sent the song to Ryan Lott (of the band Son Lux and my co-producer for A Reckoning) he wanted to add very little, but he had some clear punctuations he wanted to add to bring a heightened intensity. I love when a producer introduces a character to a song that I couldn’t have written into the script. They hear something I don’t and through their added perspective, it gains a new layer or nuance.

Here is the final version of Different Story (out on all the streaming platforms for those who don’t use Spotify) or you can listen to it here :

I feel like Ryan’s strange, morphing voice weaving in and out of this final version is like the haunting sound of words going unsaid. The tender but hesitant and slightly unsettling spirit of attempted intimacy. It is always a risk, to ask others to open up to us. I remember how hard it was for the person I loved at the time to really give me that access. And for me to give it back. The fear is that we won’t be seen or understood in the telling of our story. We fear we are Terminally Unique. The sounds he added feel to me like the ghosts of ‘past hurts’, a sonic representation of the parts of my life I’m learning and unlearning and how they tend to haunt the present moment. It’s hard to truly hear someone else’s story if you’re only listening for the parts of them that sound like you.

Thomas Merton said it more beautifully :

“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them”

―Thomas Merton,No Man Is an Island

My friend from New Zealand, Patrick Lowe created this evocative video for the song with 3D scans, and again a new layer of interpretation was added, giving visual metaphor to my auditory explorations.

I think of conversation like containment. A container or a box we put around the surging feelings. A temporary name for all the nameless parts of us. We try to put it all into words for a moment, through talking. We try to recognize each other, and soften. We try to get our judgements of the way if we can and realize that although someone else has different experiences of the world, we too, felt similar things upon arrival in that foreign land. The swelling pains of our life grow and grow until they form patterns on the surface too.

Two years on after I wrote Different Story, I’m still learning what the song wants to teach me. I want to grow in my capacity to hold space for the people I love. I know this comes when I make ample space for my own fears. There seems also to be wisdom in identifying when it is time to cast those fears aside and just hear what’s being said, without the lens of preconception. Listening and seeking to understand their experience even if it’s one I’ve never had. Remembering how to have a real conversation when I’ve started talking to myself too much. Watching my reactions as they rise, smiling at the familiar houseguests who have come back to visit and returning once more to the person sitting in front of me.

Your pain is my pain with a different story.

I’d love to know what the song evoked in you if you feel open to sharing in the comments. I’m always humbled by the different interpretations of my music and it’s why I’m often resistant to unpack my own ones for fear they’ll overshadow the subconscious associations for someone else as they listen. But in the spirit of the song itself, I trust you can hold my story and make room for the one being written in you. I’d love to know what you see when you close your eyes.

Till next time