I think there are a lot of people familiar with the Jack London story, “To Build a Fire.” The story is a simple story about a man in the Alaskan wilderness who does not take the cold seriously until it is too late. I think I read the story in middle school. It may have been one of the first stories that I was exposed to that did not have a happy ending. Even though you don’t even know the man’s name, you don’t want him to die- or his dog.
While that story and this song share a title, I don’t know how much the two have in common. There was no conscious choice of connecting the two when I was writing the song. The first verse began as a bridge to a song I wrote my senior year at Kenyon called “Panorama Man.” Who knows if that song will ever see the light of day. It’s not a personal favorite. I cannibalize my own material all the time. I will say that the bridge was one of my favorite parts of the whole song.
Choruses are supposed to be catchy, and verses move the story along, and bridges are usually musical in nature. They exist so that when you return to the verse or chorus, the ear is refreshed and you can listen to a part of the song that you’ve already heard several times before, but now it sounds new.
Of course, the trick of the bridge is that it takes the song in a new musical direction, so there is no pattern to follow. The bridge (typically) only happens once, so you’re putting a lot of work into a part that happens only once. Bridges are unicorns.
So what happens when you begin with a unicorn? Well, that’s how you get “To Build a Fire.” I had spent a summer writing dozens of songs- some of which would become Love and War, Vol. 1. I had really hit those themes of love and war pretty hard, and having exhausted that theme, I began writing “To Build a Fire.” In some ways, the whole song is a bridge of sorts.
I began with the music, which I found hypnotizing, because I kept playing it over and over. I think I used the first verse lyrics as dummy lyrics- that’s something that songwriters do sometimes. They need something to sing to get a feel for the rhythm of the vocals, so we use words we have no intention of developing into a song. Paul McCartney used the phrase “scrambled eggs” before he used the words “Yesterday.” Interesting how such a popular song began with Paul’s desire to find a word or phrase that matched the rhythm and emphasis of “scrambled eggs.”
I told you all that, because I’m not sure I could tell you what the song “means.” The ideas, the images- they just seemed to flow together. I do know that the idea of surrender is pretty important. If you want to understand the song on a rational level, you’ll be disappointed, but if you simply let go of structures, you might experience the song as it is meant to be experienced.
So Darren Eboli- aka “Cuzin D”- took the lead on this song. He really had an idea for how the song should go, and I was always happy when someone else took over the reins. He had me play the song to a click, and then recorded Brian playing only a snare overdubbed with a shaker and a bunch of chimes. He recorded his bass line, and then I added my guitar and vocals. Naren added his very spacey guitar, and there you have it. We may not have recorded it all in one day, but we could have. And everything was recorded using the same microphone.
It’s all so deceptively simple, because you already know what the song has to tell you. Sometimes you just need to surrender in order to hear it.