Anna
Lyrics by Michelle Dockrey, Music by Blake Hodgetts

Anna was eight when she built her first rocket
Her dad said her heart never came down again
When her friends pinned up Justin and Ben in their lockers
Fifteen-year-old Anna had Grissom and Glenn
Glued to her laptop, ignoring her thesis
She watched every mission, until the day when

Those noble old sisters were grounded forever
At twenty-two, it was the first time I'd known her to cry
She asked if I thought we would ever again learn to fly

She walked off her job on the day they announced
They were going back up after fifteen years' wait
The college professor drew snickers in training
"You're too old, you're too soft, it's too hard, it's too late"
Ah, but no one could ever tell Anna it's raining
Or stop her from being first out of the gate

And her family all said she should try
Was there doubt she would pass? She was top of her class
And they made her the offer to fly

In the gantry's tall shadow, her love said, "I'll miss you
But we both know your place is the sky
I'm standing behind you, when I need to find you
I just have to lift up my eyes"
And she kissed her brave lover goodbye

The missions came one on the heels of another
Farther and farther than ever before
The head of her crew and the pride of her family
Once tasted the stars, she could only want more
We were none of us shocked when they found a new system
And the call came for all volunteers to explore

She said she'd return, that we'd see her again
But I think that she knew
And she knew we did, too
That it was a lie
The day that Anna learned to fly

About the Song

Vixy:
This song is a dream, a wish, for all those who hope that we really will go back out there someday. And it's a promise, for when we do, to support and stand behind those who go.

About the Songwriting

Vixy:
I wrote the full lyrics to this song first, which is how I usually do it, but I think I had difficulty coming up with a melody. In any case, my friend Blake Hodgetts and I had already been thinking it would be nice to collaborate on a song together, and this seemed like it would really fit his style.

Blake's a very twisty songwriter, and both the melody and chords he came up with were challenging. Blake's a pianist, and I'm pretty sure Tony had some aggravation reading the chords from a guitarist's POV. I know I made a mistake or two in learning the melody he'd written (I'm not that great at sheet music) and by the time we both realized it, the song was already lodged in my brain that way. I did make one change on purpose; Blake's original melody didn't resolve. I'm sometimes okay with that, but I just couldn't let it go here; the very last "ahh" in the song was added by me just to get to a resolving chord. I had to endure a little bit of pouting for that one. What can I say, I always want a happy ending.

Tony:
I think Blake wrote the music on guitar, but like they say, you can take the man out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the man. It still plays like a song written on piano. My fingers hurt every time I play it.

There's a few spots where I resolve a Dsus4 chord down to a D that he originally didn't intend to resolve like that. By the time he pointed it out to me, it was too late to make changes to the tracks. This is a different set of locations in the song than the resolution that Vixy is referring to, above. I guess that we and Blake have differing opinions about resolving suspendeds. Or maybe it's that guitarists differ from pianists, we're so used to resolving Dsus4 down to D that it's nearly impossible for our fingers not to.

Something I've mentioned elsewhere, which applies very strongly to this particular song: Betsy and Sunnie wrote all of the string parts that you hear on this album, no one charted up a single note for them. During the mastering session, Levi asked, "did you arrange the strings?", and I proudly answered, "they arrange themselves! I put the song in front of them and this is what comes out." So it's important to note that, though Blake wrote this song's chord progression and lead vocal melody, no one charted up any string parts for Betsy and Sunnie. They always start by improvising along with a song, and in some cases (this song in particular), over time, their improvisations become a solid, unchanging, inseparable part of the song. These parts are more than mere decoration: They are an integral set of melodies that compliment the rest of the arrangement, and which the song can no longer live without. It's what they do, and I love them for it.

About the Recording

Tony:
Though Blake wrote the music for this song, he doesn't appear on this recording of it, while still appearing elsewhere on the album. That sounds weird, yet this is the second song on the album where something like this has happened, the other being Seanan not appearing on Missing Part despite having written the song and also appearing elsewhere on the album. In this case, we'd managed to fill in all the parts well enough that even Blake agreed that we didn't need him on this particular track. I'm glad we got to have him elsewhere on the album, though.

Originally, I performed the guitar part as fingerpicked arpeggios, but at some point during the recording process, Vixy asked for a texture change in the guitar and rhythm, so I recorded a strummed part instead of an arpeggiated part for her. You get the strummed guitar on the final recording, but pieces of the fingerpicked guitar part still come out in certain places as accents at certain moments where I needed some sparkle and emphasis. In those same places, to enhance the sparkle, I also added a glockenspiel sound in a very high register, intending it to sound like one of those very small soprano glockenspiels, like the Pixiphone. This turned out to be no end of trouble in mixing and mastering; some playback equipment produces high frequencies very strongly, and others have the high frequencies reduced, so trying to find the appropriate middle ground that sounded good on all playback equipment was a constant push-pull problem. Hopefully the final master has this at approximately the right level.

The overall mix and EQ of this song was troublesome for its entire lifetime. I wanted a smoother, less strident sound for the strings, and I remixed and re-eq'd them multiple times, and never quite got it to my liking. Everyone else likes it, though, so I'm chalking it up to "things only monkeys can hear" and letting it stay as-is. In the future, I'll probably ask Betsy and Sunnie to multitrack more parts when I'm looking for a smoother sound. Like we always say: "There's always room for cello". (Yes, we say that. Don't judge our puns.)

This song was the only one that required corrections in mastering, and it needed corrections twice: Once for the fixing the levels of the glockenspiel (after already having fixed them several times during mixing), and once for fixing the overall level of song in the final master.