The First Draft
The first draft of the song was recorded on a phone, in a parking lot, in 2019. I was waiting for someone who was late and I had a melody in my head that I didn't want to lose. Thirty seconds of humming into a voice memo. That's where it started.
The song that exists now — the one that's finished, the one I've played live — shares almost nothing with that parking lot recording except the melody. The chords changed. The key changed. The lyrics went through four complete rewrites. The tempo slowed down by about fifteen beats per minute. The arrangement went from solo acoustic to something with strings and a second voice.
What Changed
The first version was about a specific person. The second version was about a specific feeling. The third version was about neither — it was about the gap between what you mean and what you say. The fourth version was about the gap between what you say and what the other person hears. The fifth version, the one that stuck, is about all of those things at once, which is why it took seven years.
The Jeremy Dean approach to songwriting has always been slow. Not because I'm precious about it — I'm not, I'll throw out a verse without much grief — but because the songs that matter to me take time to find their actual subject. The first draft is almost never about what the song is actually about.
The sound experiments that happened between drafts were part of it too. I recorded a version with a full band that I scrapped. I recorded a version with just piano that I scrapped. I recorded a version with a drum machine that I kept for about six months before scrapping. Each version taught me something about what the song wasn't.
The Calitoy community has a phrase for this — "finding the song inside the song." I don't know if that's exactly right, but it's close. The song you think you're writing is usually a container for the song you're actually writing. You have to make the container before you can find what's inside it.
More on the long way around at the long way around.