![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff8067b6b-ea26-4518-98a5-78e8132aa216_3008x2000.jpeg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F576d24a8-3f55-4b02-b29b-222ab60c69a4_3008x2000.jpeg)
I came across an old notebook recently which contains a first draft of the song “Your Rocky Spine.”
The early, rough lyric pages probably mean more to me than they do to you, but objectively it’s an interesting little window into the songwriting process.
I don’t know where my mind might have been almost 18 years ago when this draft was written, but I had to smile when I discovered that the first chorus almost contained the line “volcanoes made you, and now you’re mine.” Without getting too deep and spoiling the song, I will say that around that time we were touring a lot, and seeing a lot of places for the first time, including the natural landscapes that I find endlessly inspiring.
I remember being on tour in Europe, holed up in a hotel room in Paris, France, cycling through the chord progression and tacking on wildly different placeholder lyrics. Later that year, I was on a solo tour where the first date was in Sedona, Arizona, and I drove straight for three days from Toronto to join up with the headlining act. The car I was driving had a broken cassette player so I set up a little tape player on the dash for driving music and also to record sketches of song ideas. I absorbed a lot on that trip and vaguely remember parts of the song developing then.
It finally took real shape and came together on yet another tour when we were stuck in traffic on the I-35 between Dallas and Denton, Texas. We were on the way to record a demo session with friends at the great Echo Lab studio in Denton, and I had hoped to demo the new song I was working on. I climbed into the back seat to finish writing the song on the way to the studio while Erik took the wheel. I guess I owe it to the terrible traffic on the I-35 that the song got finished. But that bit of pressure to finish the tune gave me the adrenalin boost I needed to carry it across the line. Matt Pence hopped up on the drums, and voila, we had the first iteration of the song. The harmonies needed work (our friend Serena Ryder would later add her incredible voice to the final version) and the instrumentation needed flushing out, but you can hear the basic structure in that early take.
“I Was Lost (Your Rocky Spine)” Demo - 2006
I’ve often thought that there are as many ways to write a song as there are songs, and this one took such an indirect route that I still scratch my head about the ‘why’ and the ‘how.’ To me though, there are little hints of discovering the world and one’s place in it for the first time. That it got written and recorded at all still seems like a minor miracle.
That song! So beautiful and evocative