Happy December!

My news, in brief:

• Look at the Harlequins! SONGBOOK comes out this month! (A PDF is already available on my Patreon.)

• December 12: Have Yourself a 5/4 Little Christmas on Micah McCaw’s Patreon (I play piano on two songs!)

• December 18: Anxiety Variety Show — a benefit for Create More, Fear Less! (I play a song and talk a little about how I harness the creative potential of my anxious mind!)

• Hoodies are currently discounted to $25, with free shipping in the U.S.! (Remaining sizes: two small, one large.) Enamel pins are also down to $7 with free shipping in the U.S.!

This month’s demo, “Free, Freer, Free,” is a song I started writing in 2012 but didn’t finish till 2016. It’s about time I made a demo of it!

I think of this song as a sibling to my song “Japanese Garden”. I started writing both around the same time, about the same situation. I was half-dating someone who wasn’t as single as I would have hoped. Let’s call him Apple.

Apple was an arborist, and he loved wordplay. That’s why this song is so full of inane puns. (If Apple is reading this: I still appreciate you, and I hope you’re well! I’m sorry things ended the way they did. Uh, enjoy the song!)

Apple took me to the Portland Japanese Garden on a freezing day in late December. It might have been on that same bike ride that he pointed out examples of what he considered to be heinous landscaping decisions. For instance, he loathed bamboo hedges. Hence the lyrics: “Hedge anything interesting / Plot not yet another monocot / There are more things.”

He also (perhaps more relatably) hated when people carved their names in tree trunks. Since that’s something couples sometimes do, I refer to it in the line “another name in the bole”. (“Bole” means “tree trunk”.)

The lyric “till our scale turn the beam” is a reference to a line in Hamlet that I also used for the title of my song “Paid By Weight”: “By heaven, thy madness shall be paid by weight, Till our scale turn the beam.” The lyric “there are more things than we dream” comes from another line in Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

The line “double-helix stairs for the juggled wife” refers to this double-helix staircase at the Château de Chambord, designed by Leonardo Da Vinci. I visited this château MANY years ago, in 2005, and the tour guide told us the design was meant to prevent the wife and the mistress from crossing paths.

“Free, Freer, Free” is mostly in 5/4 time, with little bits of 4/4. I started thinking about this song a lot when I was recording piano for two songs on Micah McCaw’s Have Yourself a 5/4 Little Christmas, which takes wintry classics and changes their time signatures to 5/4. Then I went to the Portland Japanese Garden, which brought the song to mind again.

I figured I would make a very simple demo with just piano and vocals. Then I thought it could use some bass, so I duplicated the piano MIDI and went to change its voice from piano to some kind of synth bass. In the process, I accidentally turned it into a drum track, and it sounded so interesting that I decided to play with it some more. Several hours later, this is what I ended up with!

Thank you so much for letting me share new songs with you, and the stories behind the songs. And remember, I always like hearing from you! You can email me, or reach out on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook.

Take care,

Stephan