I Hope You Don't Mind
by Michelle Dockrey & Tony Fabris

It's quiet in the sea, always flotsam drifting down
But I'm not looking
Let it fall past me, bits of words and strains of music
I can't listen

Chart your course and plot your days, and I can hide beneath the waves
Find a message in a bottle, wonder if it's meant for me

And I hope you don't mind
No, I hope you don't mind

It's quiet in the sky, always movement far below
but I'm not looking
Let it pass me by, lines on maps and traffic patterns
I can't follow

Sirens don't go chasing prey, they just hope that you'll sail in one day
I'll show you round my little kingdom, offer you a cup of tea

And I hope you don't mind
No, I hope you don't mind

I could trace your pathway in the tides, I could read your story in the stars
I could catch your singing on the winds, all they ever tell me
Is that you're not here

And when I fall to land there are gifts and souvenirs
but I'm not buying
They don't understand how the sea and sky can hurt you
without trying

Someone has to keep the lighthouse, and someone has to be the stone
I don't need to keep you here, but I don't want to know you're gone

So I hope you don't mind
I hope you don't mind

About the Song

Vixy:
This was a love song that evolved into a breakup song before I had finished writing it; sometimes, some part of you knows that everything is already falling apart even if your conscious mind is in denial. And often that's the creative part of you.

The idea was to explain to a long-distance lover that I never read their blog, because it just made me miss them more. And then a lot more came out of me than I had intended.

About the Songwriting

Vixy:
I got the idea to use sirens as a metaphor when I read that some versions of the mythology have them winged and able to fly, creatures of both air and water. They could be both above the world and beneath it, without truly being of it.

This was one of those songs where I didn't have a melody in mind at all, just a feeling, and asked Tony to start playing chords until I heard things I liked. We worked out a pretty chord progression, and then I doo-wopped along until I found a melody in it. Melodies used to be so much harder to write before I met Tony!

About the Recording

Tony:
The piano was added to this song late in the process, and after doing so, I realized that it needed to be introduced in a "build" at the top of the song: Guitar first, then strings/bass, then piano, then the first verse. But I hadn't actually recorded enough bars of guitar intro to give enough room for that entire build. So at the end of the editing process, I needed to add more bars of guitar at the beginning by cutting and pasting.

Recording and editing the piano itself turned out to have been a lot more difficult than I expected. I wanted to record both audio and MIDI of Blake's Kurzweil, so that if the editing of the audio tracks turned out to be problematic, I would have the option of falling back to editing the MIDI, which is so much easier. Unfortunately, in the past, I'd had sync issues and driver errors occur between my Presonus MIDI driver and my DAW (an old Windows version of Logic) and had tried to solve them by disabling MIDI. Now that the time came to record some MIDI, I couldn't get it to work again. I spent a long time digging through settings to try to find out what I had disabled so that I could re-enable it, and didn't succeed. I wish I had spent more time looking, because editing piano tracks in straight audio is painful compared to MIDI. It's almost as difficult as editing drum tracks. Splicing two different takes together naturally is very hard because of the long note decay, timing edits always sound unnatural, and even with the help of Melodyne, correcting things like a single wrong note in an otherwise-perfect take is tricky.

Later, when the time came to record the piano intro to Burn It Down, I discovered my MIDI issue and fixed it: In the past, I'd tried turning off all categories of MIDI events to solve my prior issues, and then forgotten a) that I'd done so, and b) how I had done it. Finding the location to turn them back on was tricky because they were little colored icons in a configuration screen with no accompanying text, so that even when looking directly at the icons it wasn't clear that they had even been turned off in the first place. Oh well, lesson learned. Another lesson learned: Focusrite audio interfaces have more stable drivers, and when I switched interface brands late in the production process, the Focusrite didn't give me any of the compatibility problems that I'd been having with the Presonus.

Despite all these troubles in getting it recorded and edited, I'm quite pleased with Blake's piano track. I love how his main intro/verse riff follows the guitar's ascending motif but builds upon it with additional intricacy. In all the instrumental breaks he's weaving in and around the strings very nicely (with a little mixing/automation help), and there's a great chordal build leading into the bridge that we worked very hard to get Just Right. During the instrumental section after the bridge, there's a really gorgeous cello riff that breaks from the song's timing (I think it's slow triplets maybe? Not sure), and then Blake does something to echo what the cello did a couple of bars later, I really love how that came out. Finally, during the song's long fade out, there's a "waterfall" riff on the piano that is absolutely perfect.

The strings on this song are particularly wonderful too. Since the song is a "softer" sort of a song, the strings tend to blend and smooth out a lot, so a casual listener might not notice just how amazing Betsy and Sunnie are being on this song. I try to bring up the interesting parts in the mix, so that you can hear some of the nicer phrases more clearly. One of my primary goals when adding the piano was to make sure to not cover up what the strings were already doing. I spent a lot of time in the mix, making sure that both the piano and the strings got their moments, bringing the more interesting riffs up at the appropriate times. I think we succeeded in getting a good balance.

There's a few sections of this song where some of the chord changes remind me of "Kiss From a Rose" by Seal. It wasn't intentional, I only noticed it after the fact. We sat down and analyzed it at one point, and found that it involved a certain lead vocal note laid against a particular chord transition somewhere. Something about that note/chord combination evokes a specific emotion that's also being exploited in the same way in the Seal song. We stumbled upon it accidentally, but I think the Seal song is a lot more targeted in the way it's used.

The long fade-out at the end was intentional of course. As always with fades, we recorded a bunch of bars of improvisation at the end, only stopping after we were sure we didn't need any more bars to cover the fade. In other words, we planned for a fade, but also planned that some of our extra bars would never make it into the final recording. But then, the usual thing happened, which was that everyone loosened up and relaxed because "we're just covering the fade so it doesn't matter" and then that's when the really cool stuff started coming out in the recording. This made me want to keep the fade long, and at certain points during production I was even doubting that there'd be any fade at all.

I'd read an interview with Rush where they said the same thing happens to them. Their solution is to make a really long fade tail so that you can still hear all the interesting stuff if you turn up the volume and listen. I of course, followed their example and did the same thing: I worked with Levi, the mastering engineer, to make sure that it's all still barely audible down to the last note, much like the Rush songs "Grand Designs" and "Mystic Rhythms".

The location of a song in the sequence of songs on the album is something that's being paid less attention to these days. Gone are the days when an LP record was two distinct 25-minute sides with a clear flow, where you could plan for the last song on side one to be a long fade-out, for example. Still, I love albums which flow well and where the song sequence is important, so I wanted the same thing for this album. Vixy was responsible for this album's sequencing, and I thought her positioning of this song was wonderful, because its long fade-out tails into the quiet a capella Likho's Lullabye. I think it works really well. Levi said that it made this pair of songs feel like an "End of Act 1" moment, which is the best I could hope for.