The Staying or the Leaving Cup?
I watched this music lesson by Chilly Gonzales on composition for beginners on QRadio a few years ago. Among other wonderful little flashes of insight, the simple idea really struck me of pedaling on a note or one chord, then jotting down whatever melody comes to you that wheels its way around the note being played. That's what got the ball rolling on this song "Leaving Cup". Thanks Chilly, you crazy bastard.
This was one, lyrically, that took me quite a while to finally get down. I remember singing the very beginnings of it to my friends Anthony and Erin during a recording session in Atlanta during the summer of 2014. The mystery of the line about "her" changing forms and flitting around the room kept pulling me back to the half-written song until it was finished. Of course, this wasn't the first time I played with the concept of shape shifting (here's one example and here's another), but it did reveal to me in the second half of the song what all those shape shifting songs had always been about for me. I read a book called On Truth: the Tyranny of Illusion. It was life changing. I played with a lot of the themes from there in the second half of the song. I strongly recommend the book which you can download for free.
When I moved to Marquette, Michigan, I started this band with a couple of guys I met during the first few months I lived here. We played, wrote, and learned a bunch of songs together. "Leaving Cup" was one of the first songs I wanted us to arrange all together as a band. We ended up going out into the woods for a whole weekend and recording a bunch of demos, drinking a bunch of beers, playing Frisbee, taking saunas, cooking food, and hiking around a bit. It was a great experience. I wanted to use those live recordings up at camp as the framework for the album we were going to record in a big way later on, but some of the songs turned out so well, that I'm releasing them now. This is one of them. I think this song in particular really showed a lot of the strengths we had as a band in terms of arranging, being locked in together, the writing, and just the general feel and sound as a group. We had a really cool thing going on. Here's a little video our friend Josh put together from that weekend that I'm sort of fond of. You can hear "Leaving Cup" playing during part of it.
Finally, the fact that my old friends Steffen Yazvac and Matt Whatley came onto this project to mix and master this song is a great joy for me. We all used to live in the same town. I've done many projects with both of them, but this is the first time we've done something all together and it feels so good. I find that as I get older, the most fruitful working relationships are ones which I've had for years that have had time to deepen and mature.
Love you all.
-John
