10. BECAUSE THIS IS HOW WE SPEAK

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I'm not usually one for telling people what my lyrics mean, but this song was definitely intended to be understood more so than interpreted. I had been wanting to write a song about the noble futility of devoting your life to music, and not just music as entertainment, but music as an art form. The lyrics were a direct response to the demise of the Milwaukee band, The Meteah Strike, whom we played with quite frequently. The title is actually the taken from the myspace blog where they announced their end. Although it took me almost 3 years to get the lyrics right, I knew what I wanted to do with them, but I could just never seem to nail down until I came across a random piece of poetry by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow entitled "The Cumberland", which included the line "It is better to sink than to yield!" I loved this line and wrote the rest of the lyrics around it. Throughout the last couple years we've played this song live, always with some form of the lyrics that I wasn't ever 100% on.

In order to get the super tight drum sound in the first two choruses, Joel set up a separate, smaller drum kit in an isolation booth. At the tail end of the song, you can hear both kits as they start flanging out of sync. It actually sounded pretty cool, so we kept it.

This song proved to be the most difficult to mix and went through several versions. Jeffro wanted to kill us, I'm sure by about the 16th mix.

The outro of this song was something that came out of nowhere and was composed after the entire album was mixed. I had wanted to compose a small piece using the main piano theme from "An Instrument" and a complimentary violin melody, but unfortunately we ran out of studio time with the string players. The violin that you hear was actually a section of Kara's warmup in the studio that I recorded (without her knowing it) via my iPhone's voice notes app (again, Apple... endorsements?). Unbelievably, she warmed up in the right key and in tempo with the piano theme. Assembling this outro was the very last thing done to the album before sending it off to mastering. It was affectionately dubbed "Trevor Sadler's Mysterious Blues of Doom" after our mastering engineer. The talking in the background is a conversation between Tristan and Jeffro and was lifted from an earlier studio session.



DEMO - Recorded at Super Basement Studio / practice session in Wilkes Barre, PA.