A Dark Song Seemingly Manifesting Itself

Transitioning away from working in television once again, and starting a new job in the resort town of Sunriver was probably exactly what I needed. Not only did we need a little bit more money to help support the arrival of our daughter, but I thought the TV job no longer felt to be a healthy situation for me. I took the job as a marketer for a vacation rental property management company, knowing that I was going to be stepping away from a long-standing career of television production. I was okay with that I was done with TV.

A couple years earlier, while working at the TV Station, I was knee-deep into writing my first album with my co-producer and friend Bird. Though we shared the writing of the album, both of us were in our own separate creative spaces for songwriting.

For my side of the album, I was really leaning towards writing dark songs. I needed a transformative outlet from the job I had during the day, and I was really intrigued how bands like Radiohead could produce a beautiful and melodic song while the content of the song was very dark and scary.

A snapshot of my day at work in the television station would start and end in a dark cave of an office without windows. I sat in front of an Apple computer with the editing software up, and would bounce over to the newsroom and ask what stories are coming up for the evening news. I would then go start sourcing out video, either archive or new footage captured by the reporters and videographers. From there I’d assemble a promotion that would highlight what was coming up “Tonight at five, six and eleven.”

Coincidentally it was a very violent time in my community. We were covering a lot of disturbing crimes, like murders and assaults, which seemed to be taking place more than usual. That forensic truck from the police was parked out in front of a lot of places almost daily.

I think that producing the stories started to desensitize me from the realities of the dark times, and I didn’t like the fact that I was becoming numb to those types of dark events. The storyteller in me wanted to try to transform the negative energy into some art form that would transition the negativity into a song, almost as if I was transferring the negativity from the promotional stories I was producing at my workplace into a jar instead of absorbing or being desensitized by the negativity.

I started to work on the song “Rain”, picking bits from emotion and bits from real actual events, assembling a fictitious story writing a song. It was probably the darkest song that I ever wrote.

It started with the sounds of rain and the footsteps of a man who is walking into a room. He makes his way to a bed where his best friend is sleeping, and you begin hearing the character’s thoughts of betrayal. For a moment, you're inside this mind of someone who is extremely unstable and angry. This character, who is staring down at this friend, murders him with a knife. The song then breaks away into a chilling chorus: Hold on to the night, there across the way, I can feel your fright, and it smells like rain.

After an intriguing and beautifully produced bridge of the song, produced by Bird with a psychedelic guitar treatment with avant guard piano keys, the character is then portrayed as almost gleefully walking in procession of the person who he murdered, with nobody at the funeral knowing about it.

This song is about as dark as they get. The band really appreciated the process though. Bird and I invited a man to whistle a secondary melody, and James would later preform a treatment of processional drums, like that at military funeral.

The song ended up exactly as what we were going for: a very dark melodic beautiful song with really dark, Poe-like undercurrents. I like to think that the effort of transformative art from the experiences and emotions I was gathering from my day job was also a success. We played the song many times in around town and people seemed to really enjoy it. I also made the mistake of performing the song at that insurance agency for Brian in the Breakroom (oops). I later took the song to perform with other projects, including it among the growing repertoire of original songs with The Rum and The Sea, and then onto Victory Swig.

There was a moment when the song “Rain” reared its ugly head. I was practicing the tune with the group of artists that I assembled to help me perform the show at Hard Rock Café in Seattle.

It would almost sound like I was telling a bad joke by saying, “It was a dark and stormy night”, but it was indeed raining with a heavy thunderstorm that evening. The guitarist, Dave, couldn’t make it over to Barry’s garage for practice. Rick and Christopher came over and we ran through the set.

We practiced “Rain”, and then we all went outside to watch the lightning while standing under the shelter of the roof. There was a shed in Barry’s backyard, and I walked over to the shed and opened the doors, finding garden tools and cobwebs.

“This is a perfect scene to create a music video for that song we just played,” I told Barry, who was still working at the television station, and venturing into producing music videos while starting his own production business. “This is exactly what I was envisioning when I was writing the song.”

“Cool, bro,” Barry said, “Let’s plan it out.”

That’s when we heard two people run out of the house next door. Lightning flashed while a man and a woman were having a loud argument. The band started looking at each other, quietly eyeing towards the fence.

Shortly following the argument, there was sounds of a woman gasping for air and a man grumbling. We knew exactly what was going on, the woman was being attacked. Barry shouted, “Hey, what’s going on over there?”

I quickly followed his lead by asking “Are you okay?”

The woman started coughing and gasping for air, and we made our way back inside the garage, quickly locking the door and making our way to the corners of the room. We were convinced that the attacker would make his way over to Barry’s home and could potentially bring a gun with him.

We called 911 to let them know about the issue, and asked if they could dispatch an officer to check out the situation. We learned the next day that the man was taken into custody after the woman confirmed that he had tried to kill her and it was a domestic abuse issue. It was absolutely surreal.

I like to think that possibly the only positive reason why I created that song, aside the goal of creating a melodic dark song that would entertain bar crowds, would be to get the band to that practice location during that scary night to help interrupt what could have been another tragedy that I would have been promoting for a news story. People say that you get what you put out to the world. After experiencing that manifestation of the song, it would be hard for me to disagree.