coastal alt/indie rock

 

darkfall

​​Field Notes​​

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Songs can come from anywhere.

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Sometimes they come from everywhere.

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Darkfall is one of those songs where several completely unrelated things collided and somehow turned out to be about the same thing.

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The first was the riff.

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I had been playing around with this heavy electric guitar pattern, then replicated it on bass. I knew immediately that I liked it. It sounded different to me, heavier and darker than what I normally write, and I knew I wanted to do something with it.

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The second thing happened at our cabin in the Santa Lucia Mountains.

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The cabin faces south, with hills to the east and west. Because of that geography, the sun arrives late and disappears early. In summer, a shadow can fall across the patio at 3:30 in the afternoon even though the actual sunset isn't until 8:30.

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It's not sunset.

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The sun is still shining; the sky is still bright. But we're in heavy shade.

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I didn't know what to call that, so in my own head I started calling it darkfall.

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The third piece came from my professional life.

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I've spent years coaching people in business environments. One situation that comes up far too often is someone feeling diminished by another person — someone stealing their thunder, taking credit for their work, standing over them or otherwise making them feel smaller than they are.

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I've experienced a little of that myself, but I've heard much worse from people I've coached. Give someone an assignment, let them do great work and then take the credit for it. I'd like to think it doesn't happen often.

Once is too often.

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Somehow the riff, the afternoon shadows and those conversations all found each other:

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Every day you dim my light
Every day you make me small
Every day around you I am never bright
You are my darkfall.

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Then something funny happened.

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I looked up darkfall.

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It turns out I hadn't invented it. The word already existed for essentially the phenomenon I was trying to describe: darkness or shadow arriving before sunset.

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I was simultaneously delighted to learn it's real and disappointed that I couldn't take credit...

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But it also made the metaphor even better.

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The shadow at our cabin isn't really darkness. The sun hasn't gone anywhere. If I could simply move around the hill, I'd have hours of sunlight left.

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The darkness exists because of where I'm standing.

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And that's ultimately what Darkfall became about.

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Sometimes another person can cast a very large shadow over you. Stay there long enough and you might start believing the shadow is the whole world. You might even start believing their darkness says something about your own ability to shine.

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It doesn't.

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The sun is still there.

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If you're standing in someone else's shadow, you can move.

 

Let the sun shine on you.

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Lyrics

 

VERSE 1:

you undermine me in ways that you don’t know

you minimize me with the seeds you sow

you talk about me in ways that detract

you make assumptions that you declare are fact

when you speak for me, you hinder all i do

when you take credit, you deflate my value

treat me like a victim and i will shrivel down

but i can not weaken; i want to hold my ground

 

CHORUS:

every day you dim my light 

every day you make me small

around you i am never bright 

you are my DARKFALL

 

VERSE 2:

i’m in your shadow, you tower over me

you just can’t help it, only i can set me free

next to you, i can’t be seen by anyone

if i don’t leave you, i’ll wither without the sun

 

CHORUS:

 

INTRO:

 

CHORUS: