Castles of Excitement
I am not a list maker. At least not in the sense you think of when you hear that someone is. But driven by a fierce desire for organization, and an even fiercer desire for cataloging, I like to track things. From what I gather, I may have gotten such things from my maternal grandfather. He would be one to time commercial breaks, or stoplights, for no other reason than to have an understanding of the forces at work around him. He wanted to know because, hey, it was fun to know things.
A lot of people claim to be harbingers of pointless knowledge —”I am great at trivia! I know all kinds of random facts!” they’ll say— but do they know that the stoplight at War Memorial Drive and Sheridan Road is one-minute-and-thirty-two-seconds if you have to sit through the whole thing? No, of course they don’t.
I don’t possess the urge to track random things, just my own work mostly. At this current stage —and possibly forever— I am the once-and-future caretaker of my creative legacy. If I’m not tracking it, no one is. And so I have things like song journals saved on my hard drives, and a list of every song I have ever written. In order. I used to have Excel sheets that tracked my setlists, and how often I played each of my songs live. In those days, “The Balloonist” and “Brave” were the two most commonly played. I loved knowing that. In fact, I still love knowing that.
Such an introduction is meant to give context as to why I can tell you that “Castle in the Sand” was the eleventh song I ever wrote. It sits between “The Part to Play” (10th) and “Lullaby #12” (12th).
“Castle in the Sand” was a significant staple in my early musical years. It has the honor of being the first original song that I was genuinely excited to share with other people; the first song I thought had the chance to be a showstopper. Mainly this is due to the uptempo, minor key structure of which I would come to rely on regularly for years —sometimes to my frustration— as a highly effective defensive measure: Hiding your frailty and awkwardness and imperfections beneath energy and conviction is one of the few confidence tools I have in spades.
And “Castle in the Sand” comes in roaring right off the bat. It starts with the quick, oscillating hammer-ons between the II and III notes before slamming onto the minor root chord, creating a resonant, percussive energy that feels empowering to play. In a live setting, it has the capacity to, at the very least, bring attention to itself —perhaps the first song of mine to make such a demand. You might hate this song, but if you’re in the room with it, it will make sure you hear it. I always loved that.
“Castle” wasn’t my first minor key, or uptempo, song, but it was the first one that wasn’t anchored by my timidness, or my gratuitous novice-ness. While my register is still quite high in this recording, you can hear some modest movement towards the deeper, more natural (re: better) register my voice would move into later. I was still learning the basics of how to sing, but as “Just the Same” was the dawn of my coherent songwriting, so “Castle” was the dawn of me singing with some modicum of conviction —along with my penchant for going up the scale in the third line of my choruses to bring tension, combined with a nice seventh chord to bring it back to the root.
I often wish I could bottle up that excitement I felt about “Castle” during its inception, or the way I felt when I took it to the stage at the Red Barn for the first time in late 2010. It’s rarer to find that feeling these days, despite being an objectively much stronger musician and songwriter. Though I don’t have my setlists anymore, I think the last time I played “Castle in the Sand” was at Jackson Avenue Coffee in Charleston, IL in 2014-15. This was in the earlier years of A Metropolitan Guide, and the songs of Lesser Tragedies, Pioneering, and Simulation Avenue began bullying those early songs for real estate space.
The ten songs I wrote before “Castle,” overall, weren’t pretty. Other than elements of “Just the Same,” I don’t think there is a whole lot to cling to from that era other than broad appreciation for the development those ten songs provided. But I do think “Castle” offered a kind of transformation in the way I played live. There had been some positive early returns on the songs that skewed a little more raucous —relative to a crooning, inexperienced solo musician anyway. The modest feedback I received for early songs like “Shadow Blues” and “The Journey Through” (two uptempo songs from my first EP) was usually centered on the delivery of those songs, not the songs themselves. In other words, the performance was better than the song.
For better or worse, I held onto that external opinion, and believed that that sort of conviction might be where my songs survived best. And so ten albums and fourteen years later, you’d be hard-pressed not to find at least one uptempo, minor chucka-chucka strum pattern song on most of my records. Sometimes more than one.
There is a line in my song “The Girls You Sang to Sleep” where the narrator says “But when you’re sitting down to write, you gotta’ take what you can to get the lines.” I think I believe that, and I think I believe that the same principle extends to confidence: You take it where you can find it. “Castle in the Sand” was one of those places.