"Birdsong" Lyrics

Birdsong

You wake up to the sunrise heating up the tent

Surrounded by the aromatic pines

You left behind a dream, but you aren’t sure what it meant

From the scattered bits and pieces you can find

You were high above the valley, looking down below

As the shadows of the clouds played on the ground

You’d spread your wings and floated down to get a better look

Just before you were awakened by a sound

Awake now to the heat of your tiny nylon nest

You unzip the door and step into the light

You shake your head to clear the fog left over from your rest

Wipe away the sleep collected in your eyes

All around, the forest’s also rising with the sun

Waking from its own peculiar dream

You hear the sound that woke you up repeated once again

Shattering the stillness of this natural scene

Perching on a branch of an adolescent tree

The blackbird cocks his head and meets your eye

Then he flaps his wings and rises just to show you that he’s free

Like he knows that you just dreamed that you could fly

You wish that you could follow as he rises toward the clouds

But the earth still holds you firmly in your place

Why were people made to walk instead of fly

A curse that only dreaming can erase?

I wake up to the sunrise heating up the tent

Surrounded by the aromatic pines

As I step outside the nest, I’m wondering where you went

Unprepared for what it is I’ll find

Your shadow on the ground shrinks, and as I look up

I see your body silhouetted in the light

I smile as your wings flap, you rise into the sky

And I watch until you pass beyond my sight

Major Website Update!

Hey everyone!

Today, I'm writing an update about an update. An update to the website, that is. I've made a bunch of changes over the last few days, and while it admittedly isn't as fun as releasing six albums all at once, I'm still pretty excited about how things came out.

You can, of course, just go to theghostpines.com and start clicking around if you're interested; however, I'm going to use this blog post to explain all the changes and the rationale behind them in exacting and unnecessary detail, because what else are blog posts for?

I started making some changes the other day because I've never really liked how the site shows up on mobile. This has been due partly to my own limitations (I don't browse sites often on my own phone and don't really have a good aesthetic sense of how a mobile site should be laid out, because I was born in the 80s), and partly the limitations of the Wix editor (it's great for desktop, but less so for mobile). Regardless, I wanted to make it better. So I did. I hope.

If you've visited the site any time in the last year or two, the basic structure hasn't changed much. I've changed the background, but, aesthetically, there aren't any big changes. The only real change to the home page other than a text update is that I replaced the home page video with a short clip from one of my recent live sessions.

Navigation has changed a bit, though. The News tab is still where it was, but the Music tab has gotten split into two tabs: Albums and Live. They're pretty self-explanatory, I think, but now when you click on either, you'll get a grid of album covers. Click on any cover, and you'll go to a page for that single recording, including the usual free stream/download options as well as some notes on the recording (a few recordings are missing notes now, but I'm literally starting on writing those after I finish this post).

I added a few new/old audio bits to the site during this revamp: you can now find audio from both of 2019's Triptych Sessions (tracked, tagged, and with cover art) under the Live tab, and the audio for the six episodes of 2020's Some Quarantine Sessions (tracked, tagged, and with cover art) under the Albums tab. These have both existed for a long time on the site as video files, and it was a pretty easy hour or so to edit the audio files and make them available. You won't be able to find these on Bandcamp because they all contain a number of covers, so they are website-only for now.

The Videos tab is similar, now. Instead of a pile of unrelated videos, you get a landing page that lets you choose from grouped videos from my various YouTube playlists. Click on any of those images, and you'll get a page of embedded, single YouTube videos that organize much better (especially on mobile!) than the Wix Player option I was using in the past.

I've removed the Lyrics tab entirely because any music of mine you play on the site through any player includes the lyrics to that song on the song's info page, making the Lyrics tab a little redundant.

I changed Photos a bit, too, but getting rid of the janky photo-highlight carousel I was using before and replacing it...with another janky photo-highlight carousel. It's not ideal, but it's become shockingly hard recently to find a place where I can host a bunch of high-res photographs in an album for free and then easily embed that album in my website for visitors to view. It's one of those things that was mysteriously easier to do online ten years ago than it is now...

Next up is the Notes tab, which is just a link to my Tumblr. I'm planning to use that in the future for any posts about pretty much anything that isn't a direct news update about the site or recording sessions or live shows (those updates will still be under the News tab), so I wanted to link more directly to it via the navigation bar. That means the social links to the right of the navigation bar are down to three.

I changed the photo on the About page. Yay.

I think that's pretty much it! The two new live recordings (7/26 and 7/27) are new, and there should be a few more of those coming down the pike really soon, but I'll save that for another news update. Thanks for reading!

The End Is The Beginning Is The End Is The Beginning Is

So. All the music I’ve been working on since 2017 is out now.

It’s up on my website, Bandcamp, and YouTube. It’s all free for streaming and download, but you can throw me a tip on my website or on Bandcamp if you feel so inclined. I’ll be writing a bit more about the various albums in the coming weeks, and I’m working on getting a sound and video setup going so I can do some livestreams, but for now I wrote a thing about the whole project below in case you’re interested in Deeper Thoughts (TM).

theghostpines.com/music

theghostpines.bandcamp.com

bit.ly/theghostpinesYT

At this point, I feel like I’ve spent more time talking about releasing this pile of music than I spent making it. And now I’ve decided to call it done.

To be clear, I haven’t actually spent more time talking about releasing it than working on it. I’ve been writing, demoing, recording, mixing, or mastering some part of this project since early 2017. It just...started as something small and then, umm, got a little out of hand.

I put out Asphalt Ghosts in 2016, and it was my first album of new songs in almost ten years at that point. I’d kept up with playing guitar and singing from 2007 to 2016, and even played a decent amount of live shows during that time, but for some reason new songs just weren’t coming the way they had back in The Way Old Times when I used to sit in my stuffy upstairs loft with a four-track and a $150 guitar. Then, one day in 2015, “The Light” just sort of came out all at once, and I wrote the rest of the album from there, and recorded it pretty quickly after.

Asphalt Ghosts is a sprawling, potentially dumb album that is nonetheless close to my heart, and I knew as soon as I finished that I wanted to write more songs: I didn’t want to lose the momentum I’d built up. I imagined the next album as being something smaller, something more folksy, akin to those early Bob Dylan and Mason Jennings records that had gotten me to pick up a guitar in the first place. I wrote the first song, “Running,” shortly after I finished Asphalt Ghosts with this direction in mind. I really liked it, and decided I’d try to be a bit more selective with this new project. Rather than recording the first ten songs I wrote and calling it an album, as I’d done in the past, I would write a lot of new songs, then be honest with myself about what was good, what was crap, and self-edit accordingly.

I ended up not doing that. Whoops.

After “Running,” I spent a few months pouring over old half-finished demos, old half-finished lyrics, and the ever-present pile of song skeletons I keep recorded on my phone, and ended up with songs and/or lyrics for over fifty songs. Then, I spent a few months writing words for the songs that didn’t have words yet, music for the words that didn’t have music to go with them, and mashing together bits and pieces of what was left like five year-old me making Transformers fight each other.

Ultimately, I demoed something like fifty-five songs, which in and of itself took most of a year, thanks to me having lots of other things going on in my life, including a real job that I have to work at so I can continue to feed myself. Then, like an absolute goof, I decided to keep almost all of these songs rather than just ten of them. See, it turned out that I actually liked nearly all of these songs.

So, the next step in the process turned out to be figuring out what to do with four times more new songs than I’d originally imagined having. As a few of you know, I referred to this project as “Triptych” for a long time. At that point, the idea was to record and release the music as three albums, each part of a thematic triptych, roughly comprising a cyclical year: Wilderness Amen for spring and summer, Maps for fall, and Fire and Rain for winter. But because I love writing and playing music, I kept making and recording more. Eventually Maps became a double album, then I spent five months just randomly jamming along with my looper and totally forgot how to play half of the songs I’d written the previous year in the process. Then COVID hit and I forgot who I was or how to do anything but sleep and eat and record lecture videos for awhile.

I came out of a months-long funk, learned a completely new way of playing melody guitar, relearned all my songs and actually collected them into a goddamn book with chords and keys and such so I couldn’t forget them again, and then set out to write and record the final missing piece in the project: the title track for Fire and Rain, which I had intimidated myself out of writing a year before by imagining it as a massive, ten-minute story song in the tradition of something like “Desolation Row.” Against the background of COVID and everything about my life that it had upended, I wrote it instead as part of a twenty-nine minute, apocalyptic combination of folk and noise rock that culminates with a sonic callback to the beginning of the album cycle’s first album, Wilderness Amen. It frankly feels ridiculous and indulgent now, but it’s a perfect distillation of my headspace last April or May, and so I kept it all on the album as a sort of sonic and lyrical monument.

So, in the end, there are actually six new albums:

The Amen Demos is a curated collection of a few of the fifty-five demos I recorded in 2017 and 2018 (along with a few covers, if you listen on my website or YouTube).

What Comes Around is a weird collection of instrumental, improvised jams I recorded to take a break from the “real” recording process. I might be the only person in the world who enjoys listening to these, but they were free for me to put out, and free for you to listen to, so why not? I like to think they make good ambient background music.

Wilderness Amen is the first album in the “main” four-album cycle. It’s meant to be the “spring” album, and is a mostly acoustic, mostly folk-y set of songs about, well, the wilderness.

Ride is the second album in the cycle, meant to have a more “summer-y” sound and subject matter. A lot of the more complex, jam-influenced songs are on this album, and it has a lot more electric guitars than Amen.

Maps is the third album in the cycle. It’s the “fall” album, and it’s a sort of companion to Ride. They’re both about travel and the road, but Maps is a bit less electric, its songs are a bit simpler, and I would say it is really autobiographical and personal, whereasRide is more expansive, but also more abstract.

Fire and Rain is the fourth and final album in the cycle. Here’s where all the darkest, saddest songs went, and I think they hang together well, though I think this album is also the hardest listen, in a number of ways. I mean, it opens with a ten minute ghost story song and ends with the aforementioned twenty-nine minutes of end-times folk-rock. I’ve always wanted to write an album of songs without worrying about what anyone else would think of the lyrics, or the music, or the length of the songs, and this is the closest I’ve gotten so far.

So that’s it. Are there some songs here that, given more time, I would record again, but differently? Sure. Do I wish I had a producer who actually knew how to make the records sound good? Of course! I have no idea what I’m doing on the recording end.

But I really like these songs. I liked writing them. I liked recording them. I like playing them and singing them. I wish it was 2003 again, so I could put a band together and spend all day playing them and trying to sell CDs out of my guitar case instead of squeezing in an hour of practice after a long day at the office. I’m super happy to put them out there, though, and if you take any time to listen, I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed putting this whole thing together. Thanks for reading.