Happy Ears: Initials by Timber Choir
By Adam Sams
“Initials” is a song that stands out to me from our recording session in June of 2020. We wrote and recorded five songs in five days in Brendan St. Gelais’ (producer and other half of Timber Choir) home studio in Nashville.
I remember feeling nervous on the drive up, because it was the first time I’d worked on a project with no pre-production or song planning. We carved out the time on our calendars with the intention of collaborating as old friends and seeing what songs take would shape. “Initials” stands out to me from the session because it was the hardest song to start, but looking back our process of creating this song ended up becoming part of the meaning contained within it.
Photo by Anna Sams
The song started as a simple musical idea Brendan had sketched out prior to our sessions. He played for me a piano chord progression that was so peaceful and inviting - reminiscent of something from a film score - we knew we needed to create a space for it.
We wanted to pursue this unexpected detour of adding a piano-centered song to the collection - it seemed as though it could breathe another layer of depth and color into the album to accompany, but not overshadow, the other acoustic driven songs. It had a beautiful potential, but we didn’t know how to find it and we ended up wrestling with this song for half of our second day. Nothing was sticking musically or lyrically, and we were fighting for this one musical moment that didn’t want to be found.
Truthfully, we both felt disappointed in hitting a creative brick wall on only our second studio day. But we ate some tacos (because tacos are good creative medicine), brushed ourselves off, and set our attention on a new song and a new idea. We knew our time was limited and we didn’t want to get lost in the weeds of every potential idea, but I believe Brendan and I both hoped for this song, nonetheless.
Fast forward to a few days later, after all four of the other songs had taken shape, we decided to give this track another shot. By this point, I had been digging through several years of journal entries and had numerous bits and pieces underlined. We’d been drawing connections between different ideas and piecing the other songs together that way.
There was one entry I’d been coming back to all week that hadn’t found a home. It was an obscure poem that I’d written on an early morning hike near my home in North Augusta, South Carolina, that sits on the Savannah River.
“Silvery skies / when I arrive / you blush golden yellow. Shower the trees / hiding beneath / I can barely see you.”
Photo by Anna Sams
I’d been visiting the same hidden trail every Sunday morning for several weeks, around the time everything first shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The week I wrote this entry there had been extensive rainfall, and the trail along the creek was completely washed out by flash flooding. The mud-covered bluffs were a stark contrast to the peaceful forest I’d visited the week before.
“The river runs wide / across my barren mind / swirling towards Savannah.”
I kept these lines to myself while Brendan and I worked on the other songs; they didn’t seem to fit with any of the others. They needed glue to hold them together, and I found that in a totally different journal entry from a place and time I don’t even remember:
“How do you let go of the cumulative effect / clinging to the past / like initials carved on a tree / that fade with time”
Photo by Anna Sams
This jumped off the page at me, and it seemed to tie together the images from the flash flood poems. With a little bit of tweaking, we knew we could shape this into the song’s chorus. Brendan suggested we make it even more to the point: “How do you let go of the feeling of regret?” This little line revealed the meaning we had been searching for - longing, regret, loss, and coping with the past. While these are heavy themes, they felt relevant and present. It seemed fitting to communicate a story about seeking answers but not necessarily getting an immediate response, or maybe no response at all.
Once we had the lyrics finished, we needed to sonically tie the whole idea together. We revisited the original piano progression as a bridge (our voila! moment) and Brendan went into full on composer mode, building a multilayered string arrangement right on top. The strings provided just the amount of lift to propel the song forward while also allowing it to return to the quiet, contemplative state where it all began. As the strings fade out, the song’s repeated question is asked one last time, unanswered, in the last chorus:
“How do you let go of the feeling of regret / clinging to the past? Now you’re unravelling every memory / like initials carved on a tree that fade with time.”
“Initials” takes us on a journey of asking questions we don’t necessarily have the answers to, ultimately returning us to an understanding that the answer we are looking for is simply to take another step forward. “
Timber Choir’s upcoming EP is out on February 19th.