resumption
Before the EP as a project came into being in a more a more tangible sense, there was other music of different kinds. As noted in a pervious entry it was things made and mostly shelved away, or that were leant to the projects of others; these things still had the name ‘A Quiet End’ attached in some fashion, albeit often vaguely, and mostly only in my mind. It had yet to come into being as an actual entity, even though there were slight steps towards this, it was still mostly only a foggy notion somewhere.
A while before embarking on the process of defining the project more formally and making the EP, I returned to my hometown under less than ideal circumstances. I had been living on a distant side of the country for awhile, and my unplanned and sudden return seemed to be the latest upheaval in a series of seemingly never-ending collapse/rebuild binaries of varying severity in different areas of life. I’d worked on, and even finished some things out there – though not particularly well, I’d have to say – but had largely not done anything with them. I didn’t know what was going to happen; life seemed uncertain, where to go next was very much a question on every level, and I spent some time living out of boxes. One thing I did know was that I didn’t want to continue what I’d been working on or retread that same region of material, but going forward wasn’t fleshed out in any particular direction either. Static seemed like a bad option, and with what had just happened part of me wanted to keep moving, maybe for fear of falling into some familiar traps.
So I decided to do a bit of an exercise. Over the first few weeks I’d try to just write without thinking too much about it, see what came on a more immediate level, and then would maybe make something relatively small and simple with whatever happened along. No arrangements really, stripped back to just songs; maybe mostly acoustic, not scrutinized in the way I’m often wont to do with things. I thought it might yield something new enough that I’d want to do something with, and at the very least, would help in grounding some of the energy flying around.
A number of songs came out of these initial writing sessions, maybe six or seven over the course of a couple of weeks. By the end of the third, it was obvious that there were four that seemed to be more complete than the others, and fit together thematically. I’m not sure what happened then, life stepped in and the need to keep moving became more of a paralyzing feeling of being stuck; one that would persist off and on for some time. I had recorded rough cuts of the four and had intended to do cleaner, yet still simple, versions that maybe would see the light of day, but never quite made it.
A few months fell off the calendar where it seemed like nothing happened; somewhat lost, there was some toe-dipping here and there, and halfhearted work on different things, but the idea of working on a particular project would still take some time to arrive. When it did, with some encouragement and help, it seemed like whatever the notion of what ‘A Quiet End’ was, would finally become an actual thing, as opposed to something that previously only existed in theory.
Around that time, I took stock of the many songs that were packed away in their various states of being to try and decide which might lend themselves to a short EP, and were also feasible with the somewhat limited resources at hand. Those early four seemed worth revisiting because they lay on simpler end of the scale and were still relatively recent. Ultimately two of them were tossed to the scrapheap, deemed too obvious, but the other two were decided to make up the majority of what was at that time only going to be a three song EP, and ‘Resumption’ was one of them. It was the first of the original four that I’d recorded an early version of, and was probably also the first written in those early weeks. Then in beginning work on the EP proper, the acoustic guitar part on ‘Resumption’ was first thing set down.
Writing this now, it sort of lends an interesting take on the title, mirroring on a smaller scale the bigger concept in the song’s subject matter. It was always called ‘Resumption’, named for one of the common themes in my life at that point. A sort of circularity found in picking up something that seemed done, and then having to leave it behind once more and come back again to something else also thought long over.
The lyric parts are not all from the same perspective, and some lines are intended to be in quotation marks to illustrate this difference. Without this explained, I figure it might sound like a mess of contradictions constantly running into each other, but isn’t that also what happens with your feelings when you can’t see where the circle ends?
A Quiet End - Resumption by aquietend
The EP can be purchased here for only 2$. If you’d like a free digital copy, please write to aquietend@intimatehistory.com.
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