Happy Ears: Lost by Tearjerker
By Taylor Shute
We pulled up to the cabin just before the sun started setting. It snowed that morning and it looked like we were standing inside of a snowglobe. Aside from a couple of shy deer, we were the first things to disturb the snow. The only thing we could hear was the swaying and cracking of the trees in the cold. Until we cracked a few cold ones ourselves, anyway.
It was December 2019 and we decided to get out of the city and cozy up at a quiet little cabin in North Ontario for a few days to start writing and recording frameworks for some song ideas we had kicking around. It’s kind of a cliche thing—an indie band records album at a secluded cottage—but it’s something we’d never really done before regardless of location. For the past decade we’d mostly written and recorded songs collaboratively but separately, remotely, alone in our own homes. So getting together in the same place to try doing this was exciting for us.
We brought a couple of rough demos, mostly just instrumentals recorded into our phones. Other than that, we wanted to see what we could come up with in the moment. We also brought a few guitars, some minimal recording gear, a few edibles and more than a few beers.
One of the rough ideas brought along with us was just a series of open guitar chords; lazy strumming with no real structure or melody yet. This one would eventually become “Lost,” the first single from our Deep End EP (out March 19).
“What was that sound?”
It was just Trevor, digging through the old VHS tapes in the back room. He pulled out two options: an old beat-up copy of a History Channel documentary from the early 2000’s about extraterrestrial life in the universe, and Fargo. We watched both that night.
By the next morning it had snowed even more than the day before. Any tracks we made while arriving were erased now. All but the tracks made by those few shy deer. We never did see them.
For recording, we converted the front sun-room into a makeshift studio. The heat from the cabin’s wood-burning stove didn’t quite make its way in there, but the view was worth it.
We laid down some base layers for a few tracks. Inside—a single we released in 2020—was one of them. The rest made their way onto the upcoming EP. The acoustic guitar tracks on Lost came quickly. We decided not to fuss over structure too much and simply strum the same three chords in repetition for most of the song, save for a short bridge section somewhere in the back half. The only changes felt throughout the song would be through different melodies and arrangements layered on top of that repeating chord structure.
“What was that sound?”
It was Micah’s phone buzzing. His kitchen back home had caught fire. Nobody was hurt and the damage was minimal, but that was definitely an unfortunate time for the weed gummies to start kicking in.
That afternoon we drove into the nearest town for some groceries. The town felt like something straight out of Fargo. It had exactly four businesses in it: a tiny grocery store, a liquor store, a Chinese food restaurant, and a pizzeria.
We arrived back at the cabin with a pepperoni pizza and more beer. While Taylor worked on a few instrumental layers, Micah started thinking about lyrics. He wrote some lines down on the lid from the pizza box. "It's been one hell of a ride / I wanna go to heaven, but I can't decide."
We tracked a few demo vocals to get a sense of the melody. For the chorus, we recorded some placeholder “Doo do do do do, do do do doo…” vocals. We kept this in the end.
“What was that sound?”
We were all in the same room this time, and nobody’s phones were buzzing. It sounded like the doorknob to the back door was slowly being turned back and forth. From where we were sitting we couldn’t see it, and by the time we turned down the hall to check, the sound had stopped. Nobody was outside. There still weren’t any tracks in the snow around that side of the cabin. Not even deer tracks.
By the end of our stay, we’d gotten three or four songs started. Nothing completely finished, but enough of a structure to build on that we can take it away and continue writing and recording each of our contributions in our respective home studios, the way we’ve usually done it. We did plan on returning to the cabin for another round of recording. Unfortunately less than two months after our first stay, the global pandemic had already started to take hold, and we were about to enter full lockdown mode. So for better or worse, we’d need to cancel our next cabin stay, and return to our old record-from-home tactics to finish the songs.
It took roughly another full year from that cabin visit, of on and off recording at home to finish “Lost.” We’re not really sure when we decided it was done. Sometimes it feels like you could just keep adding and adding an infinite amount of layers to a song forever and never know when to stop. But then sometimes you just sort of know.
Xoxo,
Micah, Trevor and Taylor (Tearjerker).