When a Song Takes a Long Time 🍁

Late Summer’s Greetings! 

As I’m checking in with you all today, it’s already beginning to feel like Autumn: misty mornings, spiderwebs, leaves beginning to fall — and I’m not mad about it. This is my favorite time of year, and as we cozy up in the recording studio to work on the new Celtic Christmas album between tours, I’m reminded of a very particular tune and memories of writing it.

In early Autumn 2020, we released a mysterious instrumental single. We wanted to capture this fleeting time of year — nights are getting longer, days are getting shorter — and it always feels like you’re chasing the sun.

However, the song didn’t just come together like magic. In fact, we worked on this tune off and on for nearly 2 years to get it right. When first arranged, it sounded more like this. 

Chasing the Sun is what we call a “mona lisa tune”: both light and dark play around the edges. At first, it was trending too dark. We tried adding a happy fiddle tune. We tried medieval grooves, but nothing clicked. No matter what we tried — the bridge didn’t match the rest of the song. 

So we gave up. After a huge tour and lots of traveling, we came back to the song and a simple, melodic bridge formed effortlessly in one afternoon. That simple change fixed the whole song, and it finally had the comforting, hopeful atmosphere we were searching for! Take a listen to the song without the lead parts here to get a sense of the arrangement behind the melody. 

Lesson learned: we realized sometimes we need to give it a rest. Some songs take longer than others. It’s not giving up — but taking a break can be the right thing to do, both for the music and in life.

Chasing the Sun is now the first track on our newest album, Dragonfly, so you can listen to your heart’s content! We’re so proud of how it turned out. Relive the song and watch the official music video!

P.S. This blog post was taken from one of our emails to our subscribers. If you’d like more stories and musings like these, sign up here!