The Making Of 'The Garden'
Album Story Series: Chapter 2 | Behind-the-scenes of my debut album
CHAPTER 2: THE GARDEN
I want to take you back to the 12th of November 2018.
I’m sitting at my piano in the gloomy afternoon light in the 17th century farmhouse we called home at the time, my fingers tapping lightly on piano keys, deep in thought, the window as my backdrop.
The old higgledy-piggledy farmhouse was long and you could only get to one end of the house by walking through all the rooms in between doorways like stepping stones into the next room. My piano was in the very middle of the house, so if you wanted to head to the kitchen or living room, you had to pass me by first.
The space was great, but only if you didn’t mind being interrupted. This meant my family heard me making music all the time, whether they liked it or not. They always assured me they did, but the occasional “Can you turn it down, please? I’m trying to watch TV” suggested otherwise.
On this particular autumn afternoon, I was playing tug-of-war with a song that was going nowhere. I was determined to chip away at it, playing with words, trying out chords and melodies, but everything was coming out…bland.
I was so busy trying to force the song into existence that I didn’t notice the spark of another idea sneak up on me. A subconscious part of my brain must have awoken from its slumber, because the next thing I knew, these words were on the page in front of me:
‘Gone is the garden of eden, now she lies barely breathing, now she lies in our hands bleeding’
Hmm, I thought. I quite like that. After making a note of it in my songbook, I thought little else of it, and went back to concentrating on the song-that-was-going-nowhere.
As the afternoon turned to evening, my dad passed through the house en route to the kitchen and stopped to chat with me about the music as he sometimes did (he is my number one fan, after all). Leaning against the windowsill at the opposite side of the room, I remember telling him about my latest creation, sharing my frustrations.
“However”, I said, “It’s typical, I’ve come up with a line for another song.” It was then that I realised something. I’d been so fixated on what I thought I should be writing about that I hadn’t stopped to listen to what was really trying to emerge.
I never did finish writing the song-that-was-going-nowhere, but I do have it to thank for bestowing upon me a song that would eventually become ‘The Garden.’ It now sits proudly as the first full track on my debut album ‘East Of The Sun.’
Inspiration To Creation
Over the next month, and on the tipping point of 2018-19, I spent time with ‘The Garden’ although I think I was still toying with a working title of ‘Garden of Eden.’
In between the initial concept of the idea and the final written song, I’d had my head buried in a book about Native American mythology and was moved by the stories and enchanted by the connection to nature. Inspired by what I was reading, I knew I wanted to draw from it, but I was struggling to understand what I wanted or needed to say.
Flipping back through my notebook now, I can see I was playing around with another idea titled ‘Forest Hymn’ - a song I’d still one day love to write, but have yet to determine how. I imagine these song ideas bled into each other, leaving me unclear about which path to follow.
The first recorded note I have of this song on my phone is dated the 19th of November; just the chorus, I must have been experimenting with the melody. If you listen, you’ll see that the general melody foundation was formed, and I never strayed too far from it. But that’s all I had that day.
Voice Memo from 19 Nov 2018
Fast forward to the 30th of December 2018, and there’s a quote scrawled in my songbook. There’s no acknowledgement, but I think I found it in a Medium article I read after falling down a research rabbit hole.
“It wasn’t just that ‘more people’ began to consume ‘more resources.’ It was that those resources were consumed was foolish, wasteful, wrong. Cooperations began to plunder and pillage the earth, sky and oceans with abandon.”
When I turn over the page, I find another quote: “If this earth should ever be destroyed, it will be by desire, by the lust of pleasure and self-gratification...”
Again, I never made a note of who said this, but I’ve done a little research for the sake of this post and the quote apparently comes from John Fire Lame Deer, who was a Mineconju-Lakota Sioux born on the Rosebud Indian Reservation.
I can tell you that even now, reading back these quotes, they hit me in the chest with power. The words ache with truth. I don’t recall it clearly, but I can only presume it had the same profound impact on me back then and set me on the path to making this song come to life.
On the 31st of December 2018, ‘The Garden’ was a New Year baby, born into the world fully formed, but with a structure that would be altered as it grew up.
I’ve found another phone recording: the first time I recorded a full version of the song to remind myself what I had written. It’s faster paced than I remember. This time there’s a verse and pre-chorus lyrics, improv vocals and mistakes. There’s even a line in there I don’t remember writing “Does it really have to be this way?”.
Voice Memo from 07 Jan 2019
Fleshing It Out With the Band
The band and I met up soon after ‘The Garden’ was written and got straight to work, giving it flesh and bones. Hypnotic drums were accompanied by psychedelic, spiralling delayed guitar and grounding bass lines. I remember the swell in my heart when we dropped into the middle 8 - the thumping bass drum and the syllabic vocal chant ‘hm-da-da-he-ya’. In my mind, I could picture the thrill of it live on stage in front of a crowd.
The boys felt the song was probably too long and repetitive. At first, I was stubborn and told them they were wrong, but eventually, I came to reason. And listening back now, I can admit it was a bit indulgent. That being said, the 5-minute version followed us around on stage for a good while.
Here are snippets of a messy phone recording of us first jamming the song and sketching it out on a musical canvas. It was slower than the final track came to be. There are still elements of this I actually quite like.
Voice Memo with the band from 27 Jan 2019
Somewhere In-Between
Time passes as it does and ‘The Garden’ stayed in our set list throughout 2019. On the arrival of lockdown, the song was put safely away with all the others, waiting to be played again one day.
Except, we never did play that version of the song again.
When the worst of Covid dissipated, and we were finally allowed back together in a room, Jake and I found ourselves drawn into a new creative chapter, testing out our production skills. As I mentioned in my ‘East Of The Sun’ post, we had learnt a lot from our producers when making ‘The Wishing Tree’ and ‘Cloudwalker’ in 2019, and we’d invested in software and plug-ins to experiment ourselves at home.
We did just that, spending many hours in the room in the middle of the farmhouse, playing with our new musical toys and dipping our feet into a more electronic world than we had never tried before. I remember feeling really excited about the way it was coming together, layering textures and synthesisers, with so many possibilities at our fingertips. The song was trimmed down and trimmed again, cutting out the excess fat and feeding it the right ingredients to nurture it.
Watering The Seed In The Studio
‘The Garden’ was one of the studio recordings we made in the second half of the project sessions. Over the summers of 2021 and 2022, my producers, Matt and Joel, would spend a 5 days at a time with us in the homemade studio we’d set up in an old mill around the corner from where I live.
By then, Jake and I had made our demo recording, but despite our best efforts, it still sounded too electronic. Rigid. Regimented. It didn’t flow effortlessly or sound as ‘epic’ as I’d hoped, so once we were all together again in the studio - the band and our producers - we discussed the energy of the track.
Jake’s drum kit was set up in the studio, and we put it to good use, trying out several ideas until we landed on the perfect tribal-esque drum pattern. Suddenly, we had the heartbeat of the song. We’d found the key to unlock the rest of the track.
Then Liam, our guitarist, came up with a simple delayed looping riff that locked into place perfectly with the drum sequence, creating this hypnotic, pulsing energy.
From there, the song took on a life of its own. We preserved many of the ideas Jake and I had pieced together in the demo, but it became bigger, more organic, more powerful.
The little seed I had birthed back in late 2018 had flourished into its full form. I knew then, without hesitation, that it should be the first full track on the album, smoothly transitioning from the opening intro. I love how ‘East Of The Sun’ glides effortlessly into ‘The Garden’ as if they were always meant to be together.
‘The Garden’ is ultimately where the album story begins.
The narrator, protagonist, heroine - you, me, all of us - start their journey there. On Mother Earth. Home.
The destruction of our home is the catalyst for the rest of the album, so it only made sense for ‘The Garden’ to start at the very beginning.
Right where she belongs.
Until next time…
Your friend,
Meg x