003 ALWAYS ON MY MIND

‘Carry Your Weight From Here.’ That was the title of this song for months, and I honestly loved the concept, but it had a different chorus that didn’t feel quite right to me. But – the line ‘always on my mind’ felt right immediately.

To people that don’t write songs or write creatively, this is probably not what you imagine songwriting is like, but there’s a lot of discovery in it. It may seem like an artist sat down and wrote their feelings, but when you’re in the room trying to track down a song that doesn’t exist yet, you have to give yourself some space to swing and miss. Lyrics don’t make sense at all, or the melody is bad, but you just keep punching in the dark. It’s embarrassing to post a clip like this, but I think it’s important in my journey with this project to have a frame of reference of how much unknown there was as I was making it. It was going to be very Thom Yorke-influenced at this point, and I wasn’t sure if I would release it publicly.

Back to the song itself – lyrically, it’s not hard to unpack, but they’re a few layers to things. About a year after losing AK, someone asked me if I still think about her, and I was so caught off guard by it that I didn’t know how to respond. After taking a second to gather myself, I felt like I answered with a slight chip on my shoulder, that “I think about her constantly – every single day.” I imagine that they were surprised by that, in light of the question itself, or that maybe I was going to be quietly judged for my placement on the grief timeline of their mind – but it was an honest answer, and it remains true to this day, years later. There were ripples of that conversation in the verses of this song.

Verse 2 has a glancing line about having her mother’s eyes, which I’m really proud of, because Nicole has a beautiful smile and her eyes squint a little (she hates it, haha). But I love it, and I love seeing our kids smile and their eyes take that familiar shape. That line sort of hints that AK would have likely had the squinty smile, and also, that although we did hold her and see her eyes, we didn’t have her long enough to have known what color her eyes would have been, since that takes months to know.

The song starts with a musical reference to Sigur Rós’ track, “Untitled #2 -Fyrsta”

That is my favorite album of all time, and I listened to it with her constantly. It was our record. That sound is a little keyboard called a Yamaha Portasound VSS-30, and you can sample sounds with it, and play them on the keys. The singer for Sigur Ros sang into it and sampled it, and then made a little loop out of it in the keyboard itself. That’s what I did here as a nod to our time in the NICU listening together.

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I went to Norman, OK to record and work with Chad Copelin / Jarod Evans / Taylor Johnson for this project. I know a million people in my industry and I was really nervous about if I would offend others that I know well that could also help me make this, but I had to push through that. The first time that I got to work with these guys ( in the Voyager Mastering context ) was right when we had AK. I remember feeling very conflicted with work at that time, but feeling like I met them during that window of time drew me to want to use them to capture it. They met me in the hardest slice of my life, and that seemed like the right call for some reason.

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The demo of this song felt like it was the right general direction, and I think this one was the first songs that I sent to them. They were so helpful with balancing the work of finding the production aspects with the emotional toll it was taking on me while making it. They liked the guitar part, so that stayed. After the chorus, there is an instrument called an Onde Magnetique OM-1, made by my buddy, Scott Campbell.

I had that melody in my head, and once I got the OM-1 tuned up to play it (which is a wild journey with vibrato and small potentiometers), I recorded a pass and that was final. It felt like I found a voice for her to answer my lyrics in the chorus.

Always On My Mind

LYRICS

spin the wheels of time

I keep counting days

wounds, they re-appear

at the waking light

always on my mind

maybe you’re running wild

diamond in my sky

a bridge to carry me

always seeking signs

always on my mind

carried you over

someday will come and you will

carry me over

someday will come

but for now

you’re waiting patiently

behind a doorway in my dreams

silhouetted on the sides

I bet you have your mother’s eyes

carried you over

someday will come and you will

carry me over

someday will come

but for now

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