“hope inside my baby’s heart”
I released a new single today. It’s available everywhere, or you can listen here:
This is the first single from my upcoming third album. I’ll be sharing more about the album over the coming weeks, but it’s worth mentioning now that a theme of this album is suffering. Something it feels like a lot of folks are doing these days.
“hope inside my baby’s heart” is important to me because it represents a crucial moment in my marriage: my wife’s autoimmune diagnosis in early 2018, and the suffering that both led to it and happened as a result. I found myself revisiting this song (and much material I wrote around the same time) recently, given the amount of suffering and worry happening both around the world and right inside my home. One needs optimism when they’re suffering, and this song is about me trying to provide that.
Compositionally, it’s dead simple: an ostinato of major thirds played on the piano, almost heartbeat-like in rhythm. It follows that rhythm across a verse, a harmonic development, a collapse, and then a cathartic swell. Everything supports that structure, and there’s not much more to the production than that. Even the rhythmic shift during the final section is just the same beat time-shifted ahead by 1 quarter note.
The lyrics are sparse - just one verse - which signifies to me the fear of bad news leading to despair, and wanting as a partner to inspire hope in light of that despair.
- The opening lines (“sun high in the sky…”) come from a DM conversation I was having with an old estranged friend about 9 years ago, when brainstorming ideas for cover art for the album that ultimately became my previous album STEP INTO THE OCEAN. We had an idea about the front cover with the sun high over a landscape, with the back cover showing a sunset over an empty chair. The words of the chat felt poetic for some reason and stuck with me. Years later, they bubbled back up and seemed to represent the knife point on which things can go from bright to dim, like flipping an album over.
- The “read all the books” and “rocking chair on wheels” bits come from the desk chair on which my wife would sit in our apartment at the time of her diagnosis, reclining and spinning slowly and anxiously reading about how to cope with said changes.
That same whole verse is shared with the interlude track on my first album (“??????”). I wrote “hope” first (back in 2018), and the lyrics worked as a sort of flashback / fever dream sequence in the loose plot of THROW MYSELF INTO THE BAY: after the protagonist spirals in “spiral song”, they’re suddenly pulled back to reality with a reminder that their partner is also suffering, but they’re not present for it (hence the fever dream), and when pressed, they lash out (“!!!!!!”) in the next song.
I’ve fallen into this trap (hell, I made a whole album about it already) and I know I can still do better as a partner and person. Releasing the original “hope inside my baby’s heart” is a weird way of me committing to be more present and supportive than I had been, I guess.
More on LP3 to come soon.
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