Sequestered Together

This is our band’s first song. Ever. Man is victory is sweet. But before we get into the song, we just want to thank everyone who listened to the 10,000 versions of the song and provided constructive and deconstructive criticism. Sometimes you have to tear down a wall to build a brand new bright and shiny thing. We’d be nowhere without y’all! If you’re interested, read below for the intimate deets. Here’s a link to the song on Soundcloud (which is available for free download) and the accompanying lyrics are provided below.

Lyrics

Meaning & Development

Let’s talk about the song! It’ll be fun.

My girlfriend, let’s just call her Em, is in law school. For those that don’t know, law school is typically a 3 year ordeal that buries your soul in the graveyard of your own nightmares like you’re in some twisted version of Groundhog Day but BILL MURRAY NEVER COMES. Or so I’ve heard. But because my girlfriend decided to work and attend school at the same time – she has an extra year tacked on. Obviously law school is the villain in this story.

The idea for this song began over a year ago (before the band existed!) when I told a friend that law school stole my girlfriend. I thought that was a funny concept, and I wrote a bunch of joke lyrics because I had envisioned it being a comedy. When the notion of relocating to DC was swimming about in Kenny’s head, he sent a funky piano part to me which was something quite different than the music he had made before. Months later, our banding commenced, and I still was jonesing to write a funny song that still evoked emotion. That ended up being a challenge and I don’t think we accomplished THAT goal with this song. But to work towards that goal, one day at work I took some paper out to where nature comes from (our work garden) and made a mind map about all things law school.

Here’s the mind map!

Once I left the secret garden, I more or less came out with this version of the lyrics:

Once chez Kenny was settled, we started playing music out at our open mic challenge and didn’t do a lot of recording. Eventually we realized, to be a real band, we needed at least one real song to our name. So we stopped playing our shows over the past 1.5 months to get this thang song done post-haste. So let’s get to the meat of the matter.

To get the party started in here, I brought the lyrics to Kenny who thought “Hey that piano part from a while back would work here”, and we used it as our foundation. We began meeting every other week saying “Man we gotta get this song done” but nobody had a guitar part. Or vocals part. Or idea of where it was going and that kinda kept happening. We were arriving in songwriting limbo. And then, our muse finally appeared when Kenny sat back in his giant black chair like Dr. House staring into space, and then started singing the verse melody (Home after midnight…) out of nowhere. Just genius! In my opinion, that was the most important night for song development. And it progressed from there.

Once we finally had the first half of the song finished we didn’t know where to go. My early idea was to completely change keys & play both the major and minor versions of the same chord in that part of the song. (Sort of how Creep by Radiohead does, but that’s just an example.) I had never done that and thought it would be cool. I wrote a guitar part for that and brought it to Kenny who thought it was “a’ight.” We started futzing around and eventually arrived at a skeleton of what was to come. No synths. No vocal harmonies. But it was a song. Playing from beginning to end.

Here’s the part where we’ll take a walk thru the lyrics.

For the first verse, I reference the fact that, especially during finals, it’s commonplace for Em to arrive at our apartment well after midnight and be gone again before I wake up. Apparently, one of the trials of law school is the ability to work without sleep for extended periods of time. And because I knew that she’d be coming home late, I always left the lights on so she wouldn’t fall and die in the dark forest of our apartment. It’s almost happened before. And the “sing so selfishly” part is the realization of – what am I even doing? I’m not the one doing all this crazy studying and hard work. But it still kinda sucked cause I lacked my partner, which made me feel selfish.

The chorus is really me just hoping she gets out of Bill Murray’s nightmares soon. The hammer is supposed to symbolize the “gavel” from a courtroom, which is kinda weighing Em and I down for the time being. But we’ll “get there soon” and everything will be all right. Rock-a-bye.

The second verse went through the most upheaval, both musically and lyrically. It also caused the largest creative divide via the infamous “Netflix section”. With Em not home, I’ve been watching a lot of Netflix. In bed. And I kinda wanted to express my frustration with myself for wasting my life away doing that. I originally wanted to include some profanity to show even more of that teenage angst that is allegedly leaving me as my age becomes asymptotic to infinity. Kenny wasn’t a fan but I really wanted it to stay in. (You totally don’t know which one of us is writing this post.) And it wasn’t even the profanity part per se, but it was coupled with the fact that it was supposed to be so off rhythm and unexpected. We both got a little frustrated at each other, and I kept having to explain what I wanted over and over again. Kenny didn’t wanted to include profanity, because it might turn some people off of the song and there would be no reason to do that. Which kinda makes sense. We eventually settled on removing the profanity, playing the part sort of off-kilter but still in time (whatever that means), and changing the chords a little.

Instead of having intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus in the song, we tried to do something a little bit different. Therefore, I don’t know what to call the next part. How about Post Chorus 1? Post Chorus 1 is basically about how law school isn’t really changing Em, it’s just helping her find who she is. She’s always been smart, logical, quick-witted, and slightly argumentative – law school is just refining those qualities. : ) And as that portion comes to an end, we have to pass through ‘the vortex’ to get to Post Chorus 2. The vortex, which is that BOOOOSH part, is really just the last few measures of Post Chorus 1 cut out, reversed, brought slightly out of pitch, and then crescendo-ed into the downbeat of Post Chorus 2. The gap between these two parts was silent, and due to listener feedback, we knew it needed to be fixed. I think that part turned out phenomenal!

As for the lyrics of Post Chorus 2, that’s the part of the song Josh is most proud of. They really help describe his current state of mind. Em’s new friends really aren’t just fine – they’re wonderful! But sometimes, she just needs to go home. And sleep! (She never sleeps and I worry.) And I do worry that she’s creating something that’s so separate from me that I can’t participate in, but …we’ve all got our “work lives”.

After we finished the song we decided to send it out to about 20 friends via email. We included the lyrics and just asked for feedback. Some didn’t respond, some just said “nice job”, and others really gave an in depth review. We decided against posting it to Soundcloud again and shopping it on social networks. We tried a similar strategy when we were choosing our band name and it wasn’t helpful. Listener feedback helped identify mixing/volume issues, production quality, mispronunciation, pitch, and just parts our friends didn’t understand. It was stellar and we’ll definitely do it again. We also plan to post this to some of the songwriting subreddits on Reddit. Maybe we’ll get some good feedback from there?

That’s most of the big stuff about the song!

The Music

If you’re really curious of how to play the song – let us know! We’ll write it out. (Hint: it’s in D.) If you want to follow along with the song on on guitar, you’ll need your capo on the second fret. The intro is basically FM7 (no low string), GM7, and CM7, and the verse goes back and forth between FM7 and GM7. On the chorus we more or less repeat the intro, but we also drop in an Em which may touch on Em9 at times. Remember that we’re talking relative to the capo. The netflix part is a little crazy, as with each downbeat we change to a new chord: Dm, Am, FM, and Em. The parts of the Post Chorus are completely different.

Here are some of the early versions of the song, all one month apart from each other. Except for September. We were just lazy then. Looking back on this now, it’s kinda cool to hear the versions with ridiculous autotune and the long intros. We even re-recorded all of the vocals at one point.

Cover Image

That’s the supreme court. It should be self-explanatory with the law school motif. Don’t judge – we’re cheap.

For the foreseeable future, there’ll be a super simple cover image for our singles. We’re picking pictures from around DC and just kinda splashing our logo on top. DC is one of the MONUMENTous cities in the world and we ain’t gon’ do better cover art than what these architectural behemoths made after years of training! Getcher eye holes ready.

Final thoughts

This song was a first for us, because we recorded as we wrote it. As we’re putting the finishing touches on it now, we’ve still never played the song live. There’s lots of sounds and tracks we can’t play in a performance and we’re going to need to sort that out, which’ll be a lot of work. But we made the song into what it needed to be.

The song’s available for streaming and download on Soundcloud now and iTunes and Spotify soon!