We Can Be Anything
by Michelle Dockrey & Tony Fabris

Ivory, carnelian, tiger's eye, gold
Poets are creatures of habit, you know
But beauty that kindles a song or a story
Is surely old hat to you now

Tidal waves, tears, and the taste of ice cream
I lift up my veils and you show me your seams
We'll take on the guises of all of our dreams
In a dance bold and soft as a vow

We can be anything, anything
We can be anything
We can be anything

And your name is all crystal and sweet violin
When your fingers trace silent brocades on my skin
And the whole of my world is a mischievous grin
Looking up at the stars in your eyes

Summer is taken, oh, quite by surprise
By the autumn, and winter was never this warm
And I stand open-handed and soaked in your storm
I'll be your ingénue, you'll be my king

We can be anything, anything
We can be anything
We can be anything

And I'll fly through the snow and I'll stay up all night
Tie me in silk and hold on to me tighter
I'll try and I'll try until I get it right
And by touch mend the tears in my words

Teach me the language of angles and curves
But don't tell the secret you see in my face
When you watch me through layers of velvet and lace
You'll be the goddess, and I'll be the raven who sings

We can be anything
We can be anything
We can be anything
We can be anything

Ivory, carnelian, tiger's eye, gold
We poets are truly predictable, no?
But the role of the Muse who inspires the soul
Is surely old hat to you now

About the Song

Vixy:
Back around the time Tony and I had just begun doing gigs with Betsy sometimes added, I decided I wanted to write a love song as a surprise for my girlfriend, planning to perform at an upcoming Valentine's Day gig. She's a costumer, so this song is filled with sewing/clothing metaphors.

About the Songwriting

Vixy:
My best friend Seanan has a habit of writing people she knows into her stories as characters. To that end, one day she asked me what color my girlfriend's eyes are. I went off for almost a minute about how her eyes are a lot like the gemstone tiger's eye with the brown and the lighter brown almost gold colors in and— and then I stopped and kind of blushed and she laughed. "Um. Brown."

That conversation was where I got the idea to poke fun at myself (and at all poets/songwriters) a little bit, in our tendency to create lengthy and fantastical metaphors. That was my way in to the song.

And yet I was having a ton of trouble with it, and the hard deadline I'd set for myself wasn't making it any less stressful. Then, as couples do, we had our first fight. And suddenly it all flowed. Even a love song sometimes needs just a little bit of pain. Most sweet things still need a little bit of salt.

This was the first song where Tony and I deliberately included an instrumental solo section during the songwriting phase. We didn't have Sunnie yet at the time, but we were just starting to perform with Betsy on occasion, and we really wanted to let her shine. I didn't want the solo to just be a repeat of a verse or a chorus; that's fine in a lot of cases, but for this song, I wanted the solo to do something different, and give Betsy something to really sink her teeth into. Tony came up with a perfect, unusual chord progression, and Betsy came up with the solo of a lifetime, and between them I still sometimes almost forget to start singing when I'm supposed to.

About the Recording

Tony:
This was the first song recorded and completed for the album, which means it sat in a mostly-finished state for years. I'm glad it's now finally seeing the light of day.

The strings are particularly special on this song, from Sunnie's beautiful intro to Betsy's powerful solo near the end of the song. Working with Betsy and Sunnie is always an absolute blast. One wonderful thing about them is that they are great improvisers, and I never need to try to write parts for them to play. They just play what they want to play and it's always perfect. For studio recordings, I just have to press "record" and they make magic.

The most I usually do is give directional guidelines about the way I want the track to feel, and maybe an idea of a particular style. There are a couple of spots in this song where I said "oh, I want the strings to do something special here", but without being able to articulate exactly what I wanted. Of course Betsy and Sunnie came up with something truly amazing for those spots. The first is the wonderful descending cello riff after the line "looking up at the stars in your eyes", and the second is at the end of the line "and by touch, mend the tears in my words", where there's multitracked violins doing a heartbreaking set of chords.

These things are more than just decoration for the song. They give the song its soul and its emotion. Each of these parts is something that they wrote or improvised themselves, coming up with the parts during rehearsal, at shows, and in the recording booth. And not just Betsy and Sunnie: Everyone who played an instrument on this album had a hand in shaping the writing of the songs and adding their own special mark to what each of the songs finally became. I can't describe how amazing and grateful I am to work with such wonderful musicians.

The big cello solo near the end still gives me chills every time. When we originally wrote the song, we had the intention of having a cello solo there all along, but Betsy was unsure at first. When we first sat down to play the song for her in rehearsal, she initially said that she'd sit out and just listen to us play the song first, and not try to play along with it on the first run-through. But by the second verse she was scrambling to grab her bow, and when the time came for the solo she was already off and running. The song has been magic every time we've played it ever since.

There's a sustained note during the cello solo (you can find it at about 03:04 on the final recording), where, if you listen closely on good gear, you can hear a gorgeous (though subtle) trill in the backing string parts during the sustained note. It's exactly the right thing to happen at that moment in the song, and I love hearing it every time. What's really interesting? This trill does not exist in any track, nobody played a trill there. It arises from a combination of all the instruments overlapping and causing what I believe to be an example of a beat pattern. This is more of the magic I mentioned earlier: This song seems to just spawn little whirlpools of magic everywhere it plays.

Sooj's backing vocals are particularly wonderful on this song, I think she did something like 4-5 tracks of backing vocals. It's what she does: You put her in front of a mic, and she keeps asking you to set up another track for another voice layer.

This song features a trick that I do in a couple of spots on this album: Adding a bass guitar track whose purpose is to fill in the low frequencies without sounding like an obvious bass part. The cello tracks already had plenty of interesting things to do in the low frequency spectrum, so I couldn't really record a true "bass line" without stepping on the cello. But I wanted there to be an even deeper layer, a solid layer of low frequency of each of the root notes on each downbeat of each bar. So I recorded that simple bass line and filtered it to just the lowest frequencies. I think it gives a nice oomph to the song in certain spots.