“Heart longing for a quiet forgiveness
My spirit’s in need of lift…”
This “A Quiet Forgiveness” is a song I almost regret releasing. Almost.
I remember finishing it off and putting it in the streaming pipeline for release and thinking, “what have I done?!” Why would I bear my heart and soul out in the open, performing the song on piano, an instrument I don’t usually play, in a ballad style that leaves me completely vulnerable.
I made the decision early on, back in December 2022, that this song would be “A Quiet Forgiveness,” and that it would be the title track of the EP, even before I’d written anything. As I’ve pointed out in my first couple of posts, the theme of the record is that of reconciliation, death and rebirth, and this songs comes as the hump of the album. It’s the first song of side 2 of the few physical records that I printed, and has a certain vibe to it. It’s lo-fi, telling, and is a slow burn. I’m a sucker for the last song on a record, something that leaves you with a longing for more, or something to take with you for the rest of your day.
I dropped my daughter off at her weekly choir practice at our church, dropped my hands onto the baby grand piano there, and landed on some chords that moved nicely and worked well together. I crudely jotted the chord voicings down in my notes app, entitled it “Something”, because when those moments come, you have to try and catch them as quickly as you can. I took it home to work it out.
Now, I’m a pretty lousy piano player at best, much to the chagrin of my mother who put me through years of lessons (not surprisingly, busy boy Rich didn’t bother to practice), and my college professor who said I didn’t have enough “butt time” in front of the instrument. True, but yuck?
I had listened to an episode of a great podcast called “The Self Recording Band”, and the guest was talking about creating with limitations. With this in mind, I hatched my plan for the demo of this song. Once I had figured out the progression, form, and a suitable melody, I headed to the computer. My limitations were to use only Spitfire Labs sounds, have the main piano (either the “Tape” or “Soft Piano”, I don’t remember where I landed), a main melody instrument (“Bell Swarms”; that’s a fun visual. Can you imagine a swarm of handbells flying towards you?) and another element that floated around as a texture (“Harmonic Flights”). It came together quickly, seemed to stand on its on merit, so I let it sit for a while.
The idea behind this song was to unpack the hard, healing work that I’d done sitting in the living room, a few steps away from where the song was formed. It’s the idea of being in silence, contemplating the things of life and looking back to where you have been, to the present, and ahead to where you’re being called. I found that I needed to reconcile some things in order to move forward, and really, at its root, this song is about my relationship with my father.
My parents divorced when I was eighteen, and I carried the weight of my father’s infidelity before my mother knew. This led to a fracture in my relationship with him and a rollercoaster of false starts and disappointment attempting to rebuild our relationship as a young man. It got to the point where I had made a conscious decision to cut him out of our life for various reasons. This seemed pragmatic, but it ate at me, especially feeling convicted around the biblical imperatives to “honour your father”, and “forgive as you have been forgiven.”
I was leading a small group bible study at the time, and we decided to make it topical, giving the opportunity for men to choose a subject that was laid on their heart. As a good leader does, I went first to set the tone. I chose forgiveness. I didn’t really choose that topic though. The guilt that I had been harbouring for the while chose it for me, and I needed to get the picture that God was painting for me. As I was thumbing through the concordance, there was nearly a page full of instances of “forgive”, “forgiven” or “forgiveness”. Okay, Lord. What do you have for me here? I present my findings, and in the discussion one of the men said something that stuck to me: “holding a grudge is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” I took this to mean that it was doing more harm than good for me to be carrying all of this bitterness.
I hadn’t spoken to my father for several months before this, and the next day he called. I knew what it was. It was a test. Have I learned my lesson? Those things that I had read about in scripture? The prayers that I had prayed for revealing what I might learn from this? Were you paying attention, Rich? I was, but it was too raw, so I let it go to voicemail. Eventually, I did return his call and we had a decent conversation.
Later, I had heard of a book called “Cold Case Christianity” by J Warner Wallace, a homicide detective that used biblical and historical evidence to investigate the proof the Jesus and the gospel. The first section of the book was fascinating. My dad leapt off the page as Wallace described the aspects of a detective, and it helped me understand him better. Due to my father’s nature as a homicide detective, he would be closed off from us, for good reason. I was a child and I didn’t need (or want) to know about such atrocities of human nature.
I don’t recall where, but I had read about an exercise of writing a letter to someone that hurt you to get the emotions out, and not sending it. I decided this could be something helpful in my situation, given my change of heart and newfound understanding of my father’s intentions. I sat at the desk in our living room with a glass of something tall and dark and spilled my guts (and fortunately, not my beverage.) In the letter, I remember writing something like “this book helped me understand you, and maybe it can help you understand me a bit better, too.” I sent it.
A week or so later, I got the call that I knew was coming. You can’t really prepare for a follow up call after you’ve just laid out a decade of feelings to someone. I remember listening more than speaking. It was a beautiful first step in healing the relationship with him.
I struggled to get this message across. I had the instrumental, the melody, and the story, but was stuck. I sat in my grey, stained from the previous owner armless Scandesign chair in my studio with my notebook and pen and stared at the page. Some time later, I got an email from Marginalian publication entitled “Trees at Night: Stunning Rorschach Silouettes from the 1920s.” Scrolling down, the first piece was called “Weary and Heavy Laden.” There it was. The tap opened, and I knew that would be the first line of the song, speaking to my own emotional countenance, and to Jesus’s offering of “come to me all who are burdened and heavy-laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
The form of the song is AABA, so I used the same lyrical structure for each section, and dropped the chords and melody down a step to a new key in the B section. I’m a big Steven Wilson fan, and took a lot of the inspiration in the build section from the last track on Porcupine Tree’s In Absentia, “Collapse the Light into Earth.” Another massive influence on this song was Mark Hollis because of Talk Talk’s albums Spirit of Eden, Laughing Stock, and especially the track “Colour of Spring” from his eponymous release in 1996.
This song was released to a fairly positive reception. It was included on a Prog Sphere compilation, and included as one of the songs of the week in the PAL community. This remains a song that I’m happy to have written, and I’m proud of myself for being vulnerable.
Thanks for reading about these songs of mine. If you want to start from the beginning of the album storytelling, you can start here:
