Here is my latest track for the Lost and Found album, an instrumental piece which I wrote for my baby girl Evelyn who died in March 2019. (Download: mp3 | tablature)
About the Song
Evelyn died unexpectedly at 4 months gestation. The cause was uncertain, but presumed to be placental failure. I wrote about the experience on my medicine blog.
I had been picking out this melody on the guitar through February and March 2019, and when she died in late March I decided to dedicate the song to her and to record it for my album. The piece fits well with the album’s theme of loss, and through the experience of losing a child I also found great strength and peace through my faith in Jesus Christ.
I imagine that the synthesizer represents Evelyn’s spirit, which runs through the whole song just as her spirit will live forever. The guitars represent the physical world, including her little body that was growing. After the second repetition of the verse there is a short bridge, and the sudden appearance of the only minor chord in the song represents her death. But through the grace of Christ we find peace, work back to a major chord, and continue on with life through the last repetition of the verse. The second guitar starts improvising at the bridge and continues to improvise for the rest of the song, indicating that life doesn’t always turn out how you planned it. As the song fades out, I imagine my happy reunion with Evelyn in God’s Kingdom some day, where we will live together forever in love.
About the Recording
My Linux studio is getting better and better with every track. This recording was made on Linux Mint 19.1 using Ardour 5.1 and the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2. The synth track uses ZynAddSubFX, and this was my first track to use this very powerful software synthesizer. I also used the AVL Drumkit LV2 plugin for the first time, and I really liked it. Kudos to Glen MacArthur and Robin Gareus for making such a useful and powerful tool.
I think the main guitar part is the most difficult fingerstyle piece I have ever tried to record, but I am overall pleased with how it turned out.
About the Album
Even with this unscheduled addition to the track list, I still think there is time to record the title track and finish remastering the previous tracks before the end of this year. I have learned a lot about mixing and mastering in the past few months, and I want to apply what I have learned to some of the older tracks on the album. These remastered tracks will be posted together when the whole album is released. I also need to get working on the album artwork. Stay tuned!
During the fall of 1994, when this song was written, I was a moody teenager who had been playing guitar for just less than a year. Songwriting was an outlet for the intense and raw but very private emotions that seemed to be clawing me apart from the inside. Back then the focus of the song was on the guilt I felt (the original title was simply “What I Did Wrong”).
The resulting arrangement became something of a sonic retelling of the song’s history: The opening chords on acoustic guitar are largely as I would have played them as a beginner in 1994; the body of the song salutes a few of my early guitar influences: Peter Buck, Robert Smith, Simon Gallup; the fingerstyle acoustic version I worked out in about 2002 forms the coda. The result is very satisfying for me personally, as an homage to where I have come from musically, and where I have gone. I also think it harmonizes well with the evolution of the song’s meaning.
