Song Phases: "Save Me"

Breaking down the emerging phases that brought this song to life.

Dear reader, this post includes early demo phases of my music—I’ve never shared these with the public and they will be set aside especially for my paid subscribers moving forward. I keep a lot of posts free but if you want to go deeper into the realms of my music, consider the small $5 donation each month (or the yearly option) to support this publication and get to hear the first sketches of my songs and the stepping stones to their final incarnations.

This is the first post in a new series, Song Phases. The title comes from my fascination with the stages a song passes through on its way to becoming. This process involves a lot of determination, devotion and at the best of times: pure downloading.

Some songs come with very little work. The first melodic sparks of “Save Me” came extremely fast. The unveiling of the lyrical world and working out what it meant took a lot longer.

I am going to take you through 3 incarnations of this song.

Phase 1: “The Gibberish Phase”
Phase 2: ”The Forest Path Phase”
Phase 3: “The Emergent Phase”

These were the most descriptive titles I could give to these parts of my process. As you listen through the three versions of the song, perhaps you’ll sense the slow arrival too. The first two demos feature Zach Tenorio-Miller playing the wurlitzer in my home studio. He came over and we started developing the chord progression, which led me to improvise over it. I immediately hit record in Pro Tools. The cosmic download had begun!!! As you’ll hear the first version has some really different melodies to how the original came out. It’s almost as though there is a whole different song in there. But it is the foundation for what it became. The whole thing was improvised in this moment.

Phase 1 “The Gibberish Phase”

Foreign Tongue, Mouth Shapes, Melodic Inflections, Phrasing Exploration

Months went by before I landed on lyrics for this song. I would keep this gibberish version of the song playing on my headphones as I walked around New York trying to desperately summon meaning and put words to the shapes I’d become so fond of. I remember one day in particular, walking around the Met Cloisters in Washington Heights, searching tirelessly in my mind for a word that might fit with gibberish shapes like ‘asssannin” (which I later turned into ”accident” for example). The tone of the song—moody, eerie and swelling—wanted to express something very primal and vulnerable yet I had no idea what it wanted to be. I had fallen for its current wordless state, it seemed to express something inexpressible—why should I even put words to it?

“The Met Cloisters” —an apt photograph for how I think of songwriting

I am often stubborn like this with music. Lyrics sometimes seem like they will rob the original idea, perhaps cheapening the soul of the work by bringing it to the ground and into the English language with all of its limitations.

But of course, I knew the song wanted its next incarnation. It wanted to be translated, if not for an audience, most certainly just for me. The thing is, on the heart level, I already knew what the song was about, I just couldn't put it into words yet.

In the first demo I am mainly focusing on shapes that feel evocative. Sometimes words come then they disappear into the ether again.

Phase 2 “The Forest Path Phase”

Lyric Emergence, Refined Melody Routes, Rough Pass Performance

My therapist at the time had told me to write a song no one would ever hear. He said, “Say all the things you wish you could but probably wouldn’t on a released song. Say something that scares you, or someone else. Just write it and forget about it.”

I started to stop worrying about what the song might mean to someone else and thought only about what I desperately wanted to say to myself. The powerless feeling of dependency, being robbed of some kind of innate strength I knew I had within. I vowed to write lyrics that might release me of all this. But no one needed to hear it. Just me.

That later changed. The song told me where it wanted to go and it had the desire to be witnessed. But it started in the privacy of my own experience. An intimate conversation with the part of me that is afraid.

Go on and save me
I’m sinking into my feelings
and I’m scared they’re gonna drown my confidence

A song is a living, breathing entity and my job as a songwriter is to keep it alive and be prepared for the ways it wants to grow, relinquishing my ego to keep it in the container I first fell in love with. I need to let it be what it is asking to be. Often as I am writing lyrics this is exactly what I am doing—asking the song to show me, asking the melodies to tell me what kind of body they want. Yes, it’s like the melodies are the spirit and the words are the vessels that transmit the feeling and embody them into language that everyone can understand. We don’t need lyrics to understand music, obviously — I still think some of my gibberish demos evoke even more than the ones with lyrics. However, the marriage of melody and word is a different kind of power, one that can mobilize another human being and root them in a story that a gibberish demo can’t create in the same way.

It becomes poetry and space and place and confession and conversation. There will be sacrifices in that process—in the same way that a prayer of silence changes when it becomes a prayer of words. But something else is gained as the mind is employed to translate the movement of the heart.

I remain awed by the alchemical experience of writing a song and watching how it has such a life of its own and I am given the great honour, task and sacred responsibility of stewarding that seed of an idea to life. It leads me—I listen. For as long as it takes.

Phase 3 “The Emergent Phase”

Revelation of “Sound World”, Decorative Decisions, Final Throw-Downs

Here is the final version that I did with Ryan Lott (of Son Lux). We ended up turning off the Wurlitzer performance and replacing it all with strange new twisted pianos and sculpting a whole world around it that would bring the lyric further to life. My favourite part is when the suggested textures of speeding cars on a highway suddenly dry up before the pre-chorus. It’s as though I’ve wound up my window in the cab and I find myself alone. The song suddenly feels dry and stark, immediately intimate and private.

The final gesture for this song happened in Iceland where we shot the music video —it is one of my most ambitious music videos to date. It’s crazy to think that a little demo uttering all those made up words could turn into what it did. The message kept taking on larger lives. What started as a call to “save me” when I feel unable to save myself, deepened its universality further and became a plea from Mother Earth as you’ll see depicted in the music video. There is no end to the life of a song when you let it tell you what it wants to be. It will take the time it takes. You cannot rush an idea before it’s ready to reveal itself to you it seems. You have the clues, and then slowly, you follow the treasure.

Note: This last version you just listened to is the final version I released on my fourth studio album A Reckoning. You can watch the extremely epic video shot in Iceland by clicking here. Below are my favourite stills from the music video directed by Yvan Fabing.

Which song would you like me to break down for “Song Phases” ?