#4 ~ On a book in paris, a swarm of bees and the prologue

the story of a song

On a 40-degree day a few years ago in my favourite bookshop in paris i picked up a coffee table book of street art and it fell open to a black page with white words - WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE. i stood there holding the page open with my chipped burgundy fingernails long enough for the tectonic plates of my brain to shift. I think a lot of the time we don’t need anything new [information / skills / equipment / things] - we just need to rearrange the pieces of what we already have and something new will suddenly appear. That every success and every failure and every conversation and every first kiss and every last kiss and every minute and every second gone is actually the prologue of whatever is to come next makes me feel a kind of freedom that nothing else does.

After one of the first studio sessions recording stop and smell the lightning i was walking around in freo one night and i started singing a song. I had been sitting in a bar by myself writing so i guess i had opened up whatever portal in my brain allows songs to come in. The rhythm and pacing of the melody fell into my footsteps - two in the morning under the rotunda, stay for one more song, we’ll drown out the thunder. (There was a night under a rotunda that obviously inspired these lyrics but that’s another story.) I walked around for a while singing it to myself and new lyrics appeared. If i ever get stuck on lyrics i go for a walk or a run and they come. Sometimes i think they’re lodged in my bloodstream and i need to move to dislodge them. I got home and figured out the chords to house this melody on Stella’s piano.

Over the next few days i spent the in-between moments sitting at the piano or jake’s organ or my guitar playing this song. It did not come quickly and all-in-one-piece as other songs sometimes do. It felt impossible to capture. It felt like a flickering swarm of bees, a collection of images, drawn to each other but impossible to catch all at once. I could pin some parts down but i could sense the presence of other parts flying around the periphery, back to the hive. The images were not from the same night, or the same anything - it was like a barrage of completely random memories all connected by a feeling that was impossible to pinpoint, pieces of nostalgia and euphoria and love and heartbreak re-arranging and forming something new.

When i got home a few weeks later i recorded a demo. It felt like a sugary hyper-pop fever dream. I had no idea what i was doing. It did not follow whatever formula usually worked for me. It felt good, but i also felt like it was embarrassing and like i would never be able to show anyone. Why?!? I don’t know. [I know now that if i make something and it feels ‘embarrassing’ it’s probably a good thing (the same thing happened with my song slut era.)]

Over the next year i reworked it a bunch of times. New verses kept arriving, bees from the hive bringing messages from the Queen. Some nights i would sit on my couch with my acoustic guitar and sing through the ever-growing collection of verses and just keep adding.

like this ~

@anniehamilton @anniehamilton ♬ original sound - ☠️ annie hamilton ☠️

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and this ~

@anniehamiltonReplying to @maria.camino verse two

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I reworked the demo a billion times and eventually showed it to Jake and we started recording it. I culled all the lyrics and we started with the music. The hive continued to shimmer in and out of the song. It went through so many different forms - like it was made of mercury, unsure if liquid or metal, constantly in flux. We pulled up the session every few months and just kept experimenting with it. At one point we recorded the sound of me hitting a guitar string with a teaspoon as lightly as i possibly could on every note of the fretboard and sampled that sound into a synth melody. At one point there was the fattest bass synth you’ve ever heard dredging the bedrock of the song the entire time. I re-recorded the vocals over and over and over again, changing the lyrics every time. When it came time to record the final vocals i got up early before heading to the studio and went to Good Things, got my favourite seat upstairs by the window, drank a thousand cups of filter coffee and wrote the version of the lyrics that ended up on the album - seven storeys up.

I should say here that i love seven storeys up more than anything. I think we reached a level of dreamscape in that recording that I could never recreate, it feels otherworldly.

I also think that one of the most important parts of the creative process is sharing your work. Whether or not it goes ‘well’ or ‘flops’ or whatever the outcome, I think the act of sharing the work unlocks something that makes new work better, or possible, or gives you a perspective shift.

A few months ago i went back and listened to my original demo for the first time in a really long time. And i loved it. And suddenly it made sense to me - the story it was telling and the arrangement and the production and the melodies - it was the prologue.

I took it to Chloe Dadd who helped me polish it up but we kept it pretty true to the original arrangement and lyrics. We’ve been working on a bunch of my songs over the last couple of months. working on these songs feels like shedding skin.

It’s not really a normal thing to do in the music industry, to release earlier versions of songs that have different lyrics, melodies, everything. It’s too different to just be an ‘alternate version’ of the same song, but too similar to be a completely different song. But also, fuck it. The fact that it’s not the standard thing to do in some weird set of rules (that don’t actually have any alignment to art and also my hot take on the music industry is that actually no one knows what they’re doing or what will and won’t work, and anyone who tells you that they do is bullshitting) is not really enough reason for me not to share this work - i love it, and i feel an urge to share it. i want to release the bees. It’s actually pretty simple.

WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE - every breathe and every word and every decision and every sliding door that you stepped through has got you to where you are now. What happens in Chapter 1?

it’s out everywhere now ↑↑↑↑↑ it would mean a lot if you could save it + follow me on spotify - this helps the song defeat the evil algorithm. thank you so much for listening!