Track 05
My Evil Twin
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Its Place in the Story
Elizabeth Kübler-Ross famously identified five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. “My Evil Twin” touches two of those stages — denial and bargaining — after a sudden hemorrhage in the relationship.
As the song insists, “it wasn’t some unpardonable sin” and “it wasn’t an unspeakable crime.” It was a misdemeanor, born of insecurity. But the sentence was the same: death.
A lyric from an unfinished song from that time put it this way:
From the very best thing since sliced bread
To the browning head of lettuce
in the garden instead,
persona non-matter,
That’s me.
In the space of a week. A shock like that has a way of old wounds on full display.
“My Evil Twin” lives somewhere between apology and defense, even as it knows the outcome will be the same. They say we all bring baggage to a relationship. We can either help each other unpack it, or trip all over it. We tripped all over it. And what felt like a rare chance at true communion between two souls vanished forever.
Pardonable sin or no, no wonder “I wished I could unsay what he said and I wished I could undo what he did.”
A Few Words
After playing around with acoustic numbers which didn’t require drums, “My Evil Twin” was the first full band track I attempted in Logic Pro. After hours of trial and error (mostly error), and after countless how-to videos, I still couldn’t get Logic’s drumming program to play in time.
Thinking back, I may have been on the verge of walking away from the entire project when, in a stroke of luck, I happened upon a drum loop that fit the song. No variation, no fills, just the same beat all the way through. Simple as it was, it gave me the foundation I needed.
After adding bass, keyboards, guitars, and vocals I finally had it: my first full band track of my own making.
Listening to that early version now, it sounds pretty rough. But at the time, I was happy with the start. You can hear that early version in the Vault below. According to the Tao Te Ching, even a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This felt like the first step.
“My Evil Twin” was one of the hardest tracks on the album to get right. Maybe the hardest. The challenge with a narrative album, especially if it’s your first album period, is that some songs become indispensable to the story, meaning you are more or less stuck with them unless you can write another song to take their place.
If this were not a narrative album, I likely would have put “My Evil Twin” and “River of Secrets” aside for another time. They were simply that difficult to get right. Thankfully, most of the other songs either came together fairly easily once I had some idea of what I was doing, or at least occupied a more reasonable middle ground. These two did not.
A word on songwriting: To me, one of the most challenging — and satisfying — moments in writing a song is coming up with a middle part that works. That middle part is often called the “middle 8,” because in traditional songwriting it took up eight bars. The name stuck regardless of length.
It’s often marked by a shift in feel, perspective, or harmony — sometimes a shift to a minor chord in a song in a major key. I have always loved the middle 8 in Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman,” a truly classic example of the form. Lennon and McCartney were also masters of the shift (as they were of everything). However, as Bob Dylan, among others, proved time and again, a song doesn’t need a middle variation to be great.
Inspired by The Who’s iconic Maximum R&B poster, trading the Rick for the Strat, of course.
The Vault
Demos · Alternate Takes · Behind the Curtain
My Evil Twin: First full band demo
Recorded in late January 2024, after a month of spinning my wheels, I finally had a full band track.
Early Demo
Inspired by The Who’s iconic Maximum R&B poster, trading the Rick for the Strat, of course.
Early Demo
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Gray April Day