🎧 The Making of "Surrender"
When things did go terribly wrong for our friends in ways I never could have imagined - even when I was imagining the worst - this song took on new meaning for all of us working on it.
Read or Listen.
For the first time, I’m sharing an audio version of my newsletter.
You can listen above, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or via the RSS feed.
The podcast is either occasional audio versions of posts from this Substack or the beginning of my long-overdue show featuring audio essays, conversations, and more.
Time will tell.
As I wrote this piece, there were various musical examples I wanted to share in a podcast-style presentation.
Also, while this story starts like a light piece about making a song with some pals, it quickly becomes a challenging and emotional one to tell.
I wanted to do my very best to tell it completely.
Without a recording, somehow it felt unfinished.
So - both. For the boys.
Surrender Everything
In 2016, the brilliant light of newfound fatherhood illuminated the world in new and beautiful ways I never imagined and cast a shadow darker than any I’d ever experienced.
Once Isla was born, along with all the incredible joy and depth she brought to our life I was surprised, to put it mildly, to find that the world had become a place of insane, almost comical danger.
Hyper-real negative fantasies would pop up out of nowhere in my mind’s eye.
I remember asking another new dad about it - “Hey, do you imagine…." I began and he immediately finished my sentence with a laugh - “dropping them by accident, they explode and your life is over? Yeah, all the time.”
She’s a healthy kid. It’s not what actually went wrong, it was the thought of what might. For her, but also for us. For anyone.
Along with that fear came another equally surprising force: my ability to handle it. An innate power to take care of my kids, my family, eventually myself.
I remember one moment where Isla’s sister Ruth was about to fall into a pool of water just behind me. She had just learned to walk, and swimming was not on the menu. I couldn’t exactly see her, but I could sense her losing her balance.
I had turned and grabbed her by the ankles as she fell, swinging her like a pendulum back to safety before either of us knew what happened.
It was both incredibly mundane and superhuman.
That kind of rising to the occasion happened almost daily. Whatever “it” was - an exploding diaper, a fever, or something more serious - I began to trust myself and tap into a power far beyond me to deal with it.
The question was - was that power stronger than the forces that were out to get us? And since we are all ultimately going to be very much “gotten” in the end…
Later, when things did go terribly wrong for our friends in ways I never could have imagined - even when I was imagining the worst - this song took on new meaning for all of us working on it and that question became more real.
When the summer light is fading and I’m screaming at the sun - what?
What will I do?
Find Another Gear
When I brought this idea to Pat Cupples we were in one of our songwriting flows.
Once a drive over to his neighborhood in Brooklyn had readjusted for the times but the shape remained: Bring each other a start, whatever it was, the first line or the chorus or some grab- bag of both. Play it, pause, consider a word or a phrase, try to hone in on its essence and occasionally perform the song back for each other to hear it from a different perspective.
I had the beginning, I had the shadows, but I also had this chorus, “When I’m screaming at the sun, remember there’s nothing left but love”
That little piece had appeared to me in the midst of making another song and I’d saved it. It felt like a message from someone I loved and we realized that it was that other force, that feeling that you really will do anything for your kids and even when you’re gone this love remains. Maybe even your spirit. Who knows.
So Pat helped draw out that other side of the song. From the shadows of the intro and the darkness into this light. He found the word “Surrender” and we both passed imagery back and forth.
“A levee and a flood!”
“A fire in the winter!”
The words and the melody started working.
(To hear an example of the early version of this song, 🎧 listen to the audio version of this piece - links at the top of this page)
But after repeating this song at a nice, slow ballad tempo we had a hunch that there was another gear for the song to reach in its arrangement.
Pat knows me - he’s seen me smash the drums, sing the Disney songs, lose myself in the Bon Jovi of it all. So, one day when I came back to the studio, he had sketched out this form, complete with the tempo change and the framework for my inner epic rock god to go berserk.
Which I did.
I smashed the drums, I laid into the bass, I swung the guitar through the air. I doubled and tripled it. I sang like the possessed captain of a battleship. Pat channeled it onto tape and gave me permission to rock.
When The Ocean Breaks The Levee and I’m Drowning in the Flood
We called my neighbor and fellow Bonner of Jovis…? Jethro of Tulls….? Deffer of Lepperds? We called Brendan.
Brendan Willing James came over to lend his voice and his energy to the music. You’ve met him in these pages before, but as he enters stage right for the first time in this story, it’s worth remembering he was born into a legacy of arena rock. His father was in Montrose, a band Sammy Hagar was also in and Brendan had his own arena rock experience as the bassist and songwriter in Grizfolk.
He knew exactly what we were after.
He gave us a gang vocal on the bridge and a bass outline and then he scooted back home to be with his pregnant wife.
Brendan and Daron were in the heady days of that final trimester and those fuzzy questions were starting to take on a form - what would it be like to be a father, how would he care for this child, for himself?
Within a few days he had indeed become a father. Within minutes, a truly concerned father as Seamus presented one medical mystery after the next in rapid succession and then, within a just few endless months - a grieving father.
Daron and Brendan’s first and only son had died from a rare brain condition.
Brendan was shepherded through that same portal to fatherhood that I was and then, before the first worry could be imagined and then laughed off, everything went far worse. True hell. We all watched, stunned at the cruelty of it, doing what we could to help, though nothing really could.
My own fears about what might happen to my children seemed naive and even insulting - there I was, lucky enough to be holding a living, breathing, healthy child and having my little daydreams about bad things.
Along the way, in that lingering twilight of Seamus’s life, I sent Brendan the progress made on this song and he would send reactions as he listened with his son by his side. Some part of those precious few months of Seamus’s life with this song as a soundtrack.
While Brendan and Daron and baby Seamus waded through the wilderness, the community around him held tight to each other.
Unbelievable as it was, there was another family in our neighborhood that had also been through it.
Remember When I Surrender, There’s Nothing Left But Love
Just a few years before, Thorald Koren and his wife Ashley had also passed through the same dark hallway, though they entered from a different door.
As we processed the loss of Seamus, we remembered Jack too.
Thorald is an avid runner with my wife Dari as his most steady partner. Our daughters had deeply connected and both our families had become close, but mostly after Jack had passed.
Ash and Thorald shared Jack’s stories and taught us that while his life was unimaginably short and his traumatic brain injury dictated the terms, there is that force - that foundational strength we can tie ourselves to so we can make it through.
The cruelty and senselessness of it all remained. That never goes away. But then, neither do the spirits of these children and their place in our circle.
Thorald happens to be blessed with one of the most outrageous singing voices I’ve ever heard and on a sunny summer day while we were cooking dinner for our families, we ducked into the studio so I could share this song with him.
I really just intended to play it for him.
But a flurry of conversation followed, the energy in the room shifted and suddenly he was singing with me.
I wish I had a video of him singing on this song. I even sometimes wished the video featured him so you could see him sing it - but instead you’ll have to believe me and hopefully you can hear it. He recorded an all-time backing vocal that had me literally jumping for joy when he was finished.
(To hear Thorald’s voice more clearly in the song, 🎧 listen to the audio version of this piece at the top of this page)
It wasn’t just the performance of the vocal, it was really the essence of it. He really understood what Pat and I had been getting at when we wrote the song.
The power of recording music has to do with physics - microphone placement, sound waves and transistors can create a listening experience that transports us. But it’s also metaphysical. Everything that is in the room at each moment is on tape. Without knowing any of this story, you probably would have felt all of this somehow. But I wanted to tell you.
Thank you, as always, for listening.
- Syd
Show Notes
You can listen to this piece at the top of the page, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or via the RSS feed.
Listen to “Surrender”
• Spotify
• Bandcamp
Watch the Video
Check out the video for “Surrender,” featuring my daughter Isla. Watch Here
Featured Artists
• Pat Cupples: Learn More
• Brendan Willing James: Learn More
• Thorald Koren: Learn More