This is possibly one of my favorite arrangements on the record from a production standpoint. It’s so cinematic, the vocal is so different from anything I’ve ever done, and there are loads of moody sonic colors. It’s huge dynamically. The scraping bows, the guitar swells, the way it drops to nothing at the darkest part of the vocal during the bridge “you held your demon, yeah you loved her smell. My last arrow killed her, soft blach velvet sound.” The demon he’s holding onto is his fictionalized twisted version of love/his lover. She can’t love him back, because he made her up and projected a fiction onto a flesh and blood person. He doesn’t really love this woman--he’s really just in love with himself, his urges, his own power. The concept behind this song is a sort of response to the misogyny rife within the murder ballad subgenre and my very real experiences in romantic and nonromantic relationships with men. Now the Americana purists will roast me for calling this one a reverse-murder ballad probably because the lyrics are abstract poetry rather than a line by line story that follows a protagonist into her grave with her bones screaming for vengeance from beyond--but bear with me-- I think it’s important to know that the thinking behind the poem that inspired this song is a response to the prevalence of woman being the victims of the story (I know there are SOME murder ballads where the men were the victims, but mostly even those are women who defended themselves after a long term pattern of abuse). It’s very gothic. The vocal is ghostly and ominous. And the key piece to what makes this song a different narrative is she is the one who made the move to get out. And not only did she get away, but she called it out. She told the truth, shot him with the truth of who she was, and the truth of his own toxicity, and then she walked away, because in order to keep her own integrity she had to “give him up” and she refused to be used anymore. We don’t know where her story bends after this moment, we’re hearing from her ghost, but we know she wasn’t another victim of an age old trope. She told the truth when it was costly, maybe relationally, maybe personally, maybe it killed her. But she wasn’t his victim. She was powerful. She was free. There’s also a nod to Edgar Alle Poe in the second verse “got your heart in your teeth, death watching in the walls.” The second portion of that line is from “The Telltale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe (Poe was a favorite of mine in middle and high school). A man kills someone, lies about it, and buries the body underneath the floorboards. But he can’t escape his guilt and he goes insane trying to live in his own tortured reality-- he finally confesses to the murder and leads the officers to the body but we are left to wonder whether he ever really owns his misdeeds.