Emory Thorne — Calling Up Above

Emory stood a moment, looking intently into the blackness of the space above the open ocean, before allowing himself to collapse backwards onto the sandy shore. The wash of crashed waves lapped past his feet and up to the bottom hem of his shorts. His shoes and socks were immediately soaked through. He had forgotten to take them off. The uncomfortability of this now-drenched state was not entirely negative, as it in some aspect paralleled with his feelings and accented the whole scene in an important way. If it were viewed from the outside. Being barefoot, and having had the presence of mind to become barefoot, would simply not have matched the situation. He noticed gravity’s push as he sunk almost imperceptibly into the sand over time, compacting itself beneath him. His breathing was made difficult by some similarly marginal degree, because of the gravity. He thought about how his face probably looked strange, with the skin being pulled back, skin that was used to being pulled down when he was standing upright. He forgot about wearing a mask. The stars glinted. The minutiae of these noticings was an important distraction from the obstacles which led to his being here, alone, on this shore, at night, in a peculiar emotional state. Distractions, when done properly, can become essential pieces of the story.

Calling Up Above started as something I quickly wrote for what I internally call “STPs” (songwrite-to-posts) which is effectively something I have used to make myself 1. write more songs so that I can practice and improve my songwriting abilities and 2. post short-form content that involves me writing songs (hence the “to-post” section of the name). The initial version was a lot more ambient, but had the chorus lyrics and melody already formed and was accompanied by a similar chord progression (three chords instead of four, which ended up being only the verse progression). A lot of pain in life, I think, has to do with uncertainty. If you knew what the outcome would be, good or bad, you would adjust your expectations accordingly. I often feel like I have an underdeveloped ability to deal with uncertainty, and by “deal with” I mean continuing my normal functioning in the face of, and by that I really am just dancing around the reality that all of this is heavily entangled with my mission as Emory Thorne and the difficult realities of getting artist projects off the ground (commercially and otherwise). You, I, one, we, broadly, have to just keep searching for ways to move forward, to keep going. If you keep going every day, you will see paths that you didn’t see before. Some will be so obvious that you cannot believe they were invisible to you before. But as you learn and grow and fail and succeed, your vision of what is possible evolves. Your framework of reality, ideally, gets more and more accurate over time. Even if that means an increasing acknowledgment of your own ignorance, of certain things being potentially completely unknowable (and that being okay, and perhaps a feature more than a bug). The verses are fun. There is word play, connections between things in meaning and imagery and just linguistically. I tend to treat verses this way, as an opportunity to use words and phrasing that doesn’t make musical and/or phonetic sense for the sorts of choruses I like.

Every line Fell flat from your chest You can hide in the alley Crouched in a mess Dressed to impress Wrangling time Compressed by a sunset You're a ball of yarn, An ancient tome Where is God, And where is home? Calling up above For permission to see A minute of the future A path ahead for me Calling up above Cuz my head's inside out Where am I to turn When I've already spun The whole way 'round? Cuz I've already spun The whole way 'round Every sign You scratched out in pen Your suitcase in the ocean Splayed like a man Who fell on the ice When do you find A new thread to pull open? You're a bobby pin In a broken lock You're a jail that times With a frozen clock, and Looking down I see Snakes and stones Ohhh There is nowhere I can go So now I'm Calling up above For permission to see A minute of the future A path ahead for me Calling up above Cuz my head's inside out Where am I to turn When I've already spun The whole way 'round? Cuz I've already spun The whole way 'round

I created and recorded everything for Calling Up Above at 150bpm in E major, though I think the writing started in D major, but the final record was varispeed-ed up to 151.40bpm (meaning that it is ~16 cents sharp vs. A=440, so it will sound a bit weird if you play along with the Spotify master vs. the files included in the instrumental and acapella audio downloads of this package, which are not sped up). Moving the final .wav down 16 cents will put it in traditional key. This song was written to be piano-centric, and the voicings/inversions there make up a lot of the character. e.g. the A and B chord colors are A in the bass, B C# E G# stack on the top (to form an Amaj9) B in the bass, B C# D# F# stack (Badd9?) Verse (repeats): E → Amaj7sus2-ish → B Roman numerals (in E): I → IV → V Chorus: Emaj7 → C#m7 → Amaj9 → Badd9 Roman numerals: I → vi → IV → V Prechorus (only before Chorus 2): E → A → B → C#m Roman numerals: I → IV → V → vi You can play around with whether things are more typical triads or whether they have extra notes added in to mess with the feeling of the song. Guitar-shape approximations E: 022100 Emaj7: 021100 A: x02100 B: x24442 B(add9?): x24422 C#m7: x42400 C#m: x46654