The song’s music video release in May 2020 marks the end of my longest-running artistic endeavor. I began writing For Always & Forever in 2003 when I was only 23 years old. To see it finally mature to a completed piece 17 years later is undoubtedly one of my life’s happiest accomplishments.

I had imagined what a video would look like for years. Early on during the shelter-in-place I was having a half-asleep re-listen to Language of Ghosts around dusk when the idea of a crowdsourced video of empty streets came to me.

I messaged Garrett Gibbons about the idea and he responded immediately with the thumbs up. It was the easiest music video for me to release. Garrett did the bulk of the work, but also having so many friends contribute video made me feel like the project was on auto-pilot. The result speaks for itself. It’s not only a great homage to the unique time of the COVID-19 shelter in place, but also to a song that has been dear to me for a long time.

Melody & Lyrics

I like to come up with a song’s melody before writing lyrics. Once I have an interesting chord progression, I hum different melodies, trying to find a perfect match to the mood. When a chord-melody-mood-match exists, I write lyrics to come up with a chord-melody-lyric-mood-match. This is why my songs are so moody.

I rarely keep the first lines I write. If the lyrics are too predictable, I get bored with them. They have to surprise me every time I sing the song, otherwise I’ll lose interest and stop singing it all together. Once I written something interesting, I ask myself, “What would make it even more interesting?”

This process can take years, but it worked well with For Always & Forever.

I hope you enjoy it.

Versions

The original demo (below) wasn’t lost in my hard drive crash of 2005, because I liked it enough to email myself a copy. My college band Abika played an early version of it live once in Salt Lake City to an empty bar in 2004.

The next version is the oldest recording of the full song. The opening and closing lyrics still hadn’t evolved, otherwise, the song was complete. You can hear Emilie typing her grad school work in the background. This is typical of a lot of my recordings from 2008-2013.

Here is the song with finalized lyrics and Emilie’s harmonies. Only thing really missing are the oohs and aahs over the instrumental leading into the third verse. This would come later, closer to recording. It’s one of my favorite parts of the song. My favorite part of the song is singing the line, “and I died for you!”

Here’s a pretty version played with a capo on the first fret and some lyric variation.

Finally, here are the rehearsals for the album recording. This lets you hear how the different parts were experimented.