Happy Ears: Redcoats by Zander Hawley
By Zander Hawley
I wrote Redcoats 7000 feet up in the sequoias over the course of a daylong mushroom trip. I had brought up a weird high-strung guitar from Old Style that I hadn’t managed to pull a song out of yet, and there were a couple false starts on different songs before Redcoats started happening. I got the main melody before anything else and probably played it over and over again for an hour or two before I went outside to see how my friends (who were also be-shroomed) were doing. I found a stick perfectly placed on top of a boulder I climbed (if we’re really letting the mushroom version of me tell the story, the woods gifted me the stick) and sat there, on top of the boulder, humming my new little melody and banging the stick on the boulder for upwards of 20 minutes. Upon returning inside began working on lyrics and the different instrumental sections - the guitar and its tuning (C#G#C#D#G#C#) really lent themselves to the instrumentals and I doubt I could’ve written this song on any other guitar.
The song is a result of a lot of what I was reflecting on at the time - forgiveness, friendship, ego (and trying to release yourself from it). I’m a perfectionist by nature and I don’t like the idea of leaving any challenge unmet, no matter how unnecessary the challenge may be. I was encouraged by the friends I was on the trip with, both of them a little older and a little wiser than I, to let go of that search for comprehensive personal victory and instead just let the world exist and focus on being the best version of myself in the present as I can.
To paraphrase a friend: “The past doesn’t exist, neither does the future. To obsess over either is the definition of insanity.”
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