Rerun

Lyrics:

You broke my heart into tiny little pieces
I see them every morning still on my bedroom floor
You broke my heart and left here to pick up all those pieces,
Scattered in your wake as you walked out that door.
There’s ghosts haunting my dreams.

There’s memories in my inbox and on my memory card
I find myself in a mise-en-scène from five or ten years ago,
I like this circular focus, looping over the past,
Timelines are blurred, events replayed.
More real in memory than life.

Am I getting sentimental, nostalgic in my young age?
Do we mourn the past so readily, not cherishing the present day?

It’s a rerun.
It’s a ghost haunting my dreams,
It’s a rerun.

© eamon brett 2011

About this song:

I think of this song and Restless as being the flip sides of the same song. Written on the same day, and initially in related keys. This is in Eminor, and Restless was written originally in Gmajor. There’s something in it that eventually Restless ended up in B flat major – as far away as you can get really from E minor, being a tritone apart. In a way it’s far more apt that the two songs turned out the way they did. Even in studio, one is quite sparse whereas the other is quite fully textured with a lot happening.

Recording this song:

This turned out to be the trickiest one to get on record in many ways. It’s one that I really wanted to do in the studio, as it was one that I knew needed the fuller sound to really come alive as a song. The vocal that is on the recording was the vocal we recorded initially as the reference track for the song to give to the other musicians, but it still held its own when the other instruments and voices were laid down.

Karl came in with a brilliant drum part for it, and just understood what I was trying to do with the track. We kept stacking up the vocal and string parts too, and double tracked some piano in the ending sections to make it feel bigger again. It was the track that was the trickiest when it came to mixing it – trying to get the peaks and climaxes right, and trying to make sure there was a sense of trajectory to the buildups that made sense. In some ways it was one of the most rewarding of the songs in the studio, as I finally got to hear it come together as this big full band sound that I hear in my head when I’m playing it solo with just a piano.

Song credits:

mister ebby – piano, vocals
m̩adhbh sullivan Рvocals
aonghus mac amhlaigh – cello
george guilfoyle – double bass
karl hand – drums