Day 8: They Never Returned

Lyrics:
They packed their bags, they left at dawn
And no one knew except their dogs
They headed west to Gallow's Park
They went to play down in the dark

Despite all those concerned
They never returned

A map was found at the cave of rings
A broken lamp and a ball of string
The rangers looked, but they could not find
The cavers lost had left no signs

As well could be discerned
They'll never return

Days go by, you'll hear the wind blow
A lonesome wail within the cavern walls

Another group, another night
Around the fire in their campsite
They tell the tale of lovers lost
Perhaps they lay beneath the moss

But as the fire burns
They'll maybe return

Details: I spent the first couple hours fretting about something non-music related, and it just reminds me that I really need to clear my schedule in order to be able to focus on writing a song everyday for a whole month. I enjoy the simplicity of the whole thing: I get up, go to work, come home, write a song, and post it online. Not to imply it's easy, just that it's straight-forward. Normally I feel like I'm trying to coordinate a million things and coralling a bunch of people. Writing a song a day is just a clear task you can rely on to be the same everyday (while allowing for the product to be quite different each time).

Anyway, this is the second night in a row where I went through several ideas and threw them away. I started with a similar guitar drone, but done in a minor key, and it felt HUGE. I felt like it needed to be a political song, but I have a hard time writing a political song in such short amount of time. So I shifted to a major key and went through a couple iterations that reminded me too much of songs by Radiohead and Andrew Bird. But I finally settled on this variation, which sounded fairly new to me.

Once again, I was working with a prompt from the Fearless Songwriting challenge. Today's prompt was "Caves". When I was exploring the minor key version, I was going to use caves as a metaphor-- you know, like a cavernous heart or brain or some such. But when I switched to a major key, it just came to me that it was about a couple who died while spelunking. I think drones are good at expressing that sense of loss, or maybe of a lack of resolution.

So, anyway, including my split thoughts early on, it took about 6 hours to write this song, but I got the recording done in one take (my apologies if it's a sloppy performance).