Drowning is our oldest surviving song. It was on a CD of ideas I mailed to the guys before we were a band and it was the second of our songs that Hugh learned on bass. I remember he and I played it at a coffee house and I broke a string. I was probably playing inappropriately hard for the setting (although I think that it impressed Steve who was in the audience). The song has changed a bit – we’ve stripped it right down and substituted lyrics here and there – but it’s mostly the same as when we played it at our very first show.
The version on this album actually uses a couple tracks from our independent recordings. Both guitars were recorded in Hugh’s parent’s house and the cello we recorded guerilla style at Queen’s University in Kingston. We basically put together a portable recording studio and snuck into the Sutherland Room, a large, old, wood-lined room in the University Center. We did eventually get kicked out – just as we finished recording for this song!
Oh, and that thing you can hear in the background that sounds like a super-gigantic metallic sonar or something, it’s actually a pen being tapped on a plate. But that’s a different story altogether.
[Listen to Drowning]
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Hugh and I had rented a three bedroom town house in Kingston while he was finishing his last year of university. Steve was also finishing up school in Kingston but had already signed a lease just down the street with some friends. Dan was teaching at a private school just outside of Kingston and I was working at a bakery knowing that band was eventually going to become our number one focus. We wanted to rent a three bedroom house because we wanted room to setup all the band equipment. The third bedroom ended up being an office for Hugh to do his school work, our dining room became our living room and our living room became our band room, coincidentally the largest open area in the house.
So many nights during that year in Kingston Hugh would be studying hard as I sat in the stairwell or the kitchen playing my acoustic guitar trying to come up with some idea, some riff, that would evoke a comment from the office upstairs. I can’t remember the actual moment in which Hugh probably said something fairly simple such as “That last thing you were playing was pretty cool” but it only ever took that for me to show it to the other guys the next time they were over. It was most likely a Sunday because that’s when Dan would usually make the hour drive to Kingston so we could have band practice and I remember thinking that I was going to show him these verse, pre-chorus and chorus parts I had been working on. I remember feeling confident he wasn’t going to like them but I was feeling obligated to show him because they felt so good to me. Being the super self conscious guitar player I am I had prepared myself for this reaction and was completely o.k. with sweeping these idea’s into the trash. Much to my surprise Dan seemed to really like them so we decided to work on them at the next practice.
Our living room window faced west and at sunset the room would always have an inspiring glow to it but on this particular day it was nothing short of spectacular. As we plugged in our equipment and got settled into our little personal bubbles the room felt normal as usual. We started to throw around ideas for the song and it just started falling into place. A bridge was easily formed and Dan dropped the eventual melody he sings to this day in without any hesitation. As the different parts formed into a song, the room was turning from its usual stale white into a burning fusion of red and orange and it was a songwriting moment I will never forget. The sun was beaming in on all of us with these incredible colours and the room was screaming with a beautiful mesh of bass, drums, piano and guitar. And then it happened. As we swooped emotionally into the chorus the mumbled melody idea Dan was using easily transitioned into wise words to live by,
“Take it slow…and steady…”
[Listen to Slow and Steady]
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