Check out our new song, Hold Hold Baby. Read the full story below…
Welcome to week three of music month. Last week I talked about when a song can be simple and intuitive, but how do you finish a song that feels like a grind? Today’s post is about a song Anna and I recently recorded and it’s journey.
5 years ago Anna wrote a song about our daughter, Juniper. June loved to be held and would reach her arms up saying, “hold hold baby.” Like most of Anna’s songs it was lyrically driven, accompanied by acoustic guitar. She has played the song at our shows multiple times and we felt like we knew the song inside and out. About 4 months ago we thought it would be an easy one to record and a “warm up” for some other projects.
It turned out that the song was much harder than we thought, as many things in life are. We were excited to get into the studio and immmediately started experimenting with different sounds, drums, and instrumentation. But before we knew it we’d lost the identity of the song…taking a lullaby and turning it into a Sound Garden-esque ballad. We knew we needed to strip it way back.
At this point we’d put in many nights and felt defeated. It’s exhausting recording at 10 pm after a long day of work and parenting and still feel like you’re not making progress. We took a couple weeks off and when we came back we set a deadline of 1 week. (See my post about the “show-time” rule) We also reminded ourselves of the original purpose and why we were recording it in the first place. Anna wrote this song for our kids and they wouldn’t care whether it sounded like Limp Bisquit or Enya.
Setting our intentions and a deadline helped us push pass the challenges. It’s still not perfect, but we’re proud of where it’s at and that we finished a project together.