The Ateliers: Moon: Where You Stay

Welcome to the fourth entry of our Moon blogs. As you may know, we’re releasing one song a month and making podcasts and blogs for each of the songs as they come out. In this entry, we’ll be discussing our third song on the album, “Where You Stay.”

As you most likely noticed, we added a trumpet! This is the first brass we’ve featured in any of our songs and we’re really grateful for how it turned out. We actually had the entire track mixed without the trumpet because the session kept getting pushed back. We were about a week from our deadline when we were able to lock in the session and track this trumpet! It was supposed to be a trombone actually, but our player, Greg Samuel, had other ideas. He had great ideas. So a big thank you to Greg for laying down the trumpet and really setting this track apart. We also had a lot of new percussion elements from Brian Melbloom and Omar Leyva, so a huge thank you to them as well.

Alright, let’s get into the writing process. It’s pretty crazy how songs change or don't change from their initial version. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s pretty important that I get the entire structure in that first few hour sit down or it ends up being a cool idea that I typically won’t remember. It seems I’m getting more comfortable editing songs after the fact, but I still don’t count on it. Even changing one line in "Where You Stay" is pretty rare. I also try and resist recording it before I’m finished writing the lyrics. This challenges me to remember all of the lyrics. I feel like if I can’t remember lyrics that I just wrote, they must not be honest enough and therefore not worth keeping! This process also helps me write lyrics that are easier to remember when playing live.

I made some really close friends at the beginning of 2018 and they were a big part of what inspired the song. I was up in Big Bear with the ateliers about to play a set for a camp. I started thinking of my friends down the hill who all happened to live in Arcadia. Arcadia is just 5 miles from my house in Monrovia. That’s this line..

"I'm 70 miles far from home, I'm 75 from you."

It was about 40 degrees but we were in a warm A-frame building. you could hear all the kids outside running around and screaming. We had a lot of time before our set so I started writing a bit. This theme of longing for commitment to people kept coming up and it made me think of a song I had previously written called Colombo By Night. I put the capo on Fret 3 of an acoustic in standard tuning and started playing C major shapes just like I do in Colombo. This song is different in that I started playing power chord shapes rather than the more common open chords you typically hear on an acoustic. The power chord feel brings more energy to the song. You also have to slide around a bit more to get to each chord so that adds a different texture as well.

This second verse addresses the difficulty of committed relationships. They take time and no one person can make it work- everyone’s gotta give effort in the way they can or it will inevitably fall apart. I think having the desire to make it work is a great starting place.

This song turned out to be more light hearted and fun than the majority of our songs. I feel the concept is still deep and the intimacy during the bridge helps us to feel it.

But ultimately, committed relationships of some kind are important for all of us to maintain and when we feel like maintaining them, it’s a celebration. Thanks for reading, we know it’s work, but it’s worth it!

Listen to "Where You Stay" podcast