Track 07
Nightmare on Franklin Street
Video coming soon · check back for the official track video
A frequent visitor to my placein the Grove
Its Place in the Story
Exactly a week after I returned to Maryland from Miami, stunned and bewildered, a part of my body literally died. I was diagnosed with osteonecrosis–literally, bone death–in my leg. I couldn’t help thinking this somehow mirrored my emotional experience. And both, seemingly, inexplicable and out of nowhere.
One day I was moving around normally; the next I could barely walk. Ultimately, I needed major surgery followed by a notoriously slow and painful recovery. It deprived me of the coping mechanisms I typically turn to under trying circumstances: marathon bike rides, travel, movement. Forget moving forward — I could barely move. And because my knee was involved, I couldn’t even sit in my accustomed meditation posture.
Easy on the eyes, hard on the ears--Peacocks give off a terrible shriek, like a terrified cat backed into a corner. I’d often wake with a start to that sound—1000 miles away.
All of this proved to be too much. I began having incredibly vivid, often frightening dreams. The nightmares would leave me waking with a start, disoriented, convinced for a moment that I was back in my bed in Miami. Hence, the song’s title.
Given the vivid dreams, a friend suggested I keep a dream journal and write down whatever I remembered upon waking. I took this on by writing the dreams in pre-coffee stream-of-consciousness prose, without regard for sentence structure, punctuation, or whether it made any sense — just letting it flow.
The nightmares were dark and vivid, filled with ghosts of past failures, missed opportunities, and self-recrimination, mostly shadows and images that seemed, as I wrote in the journal at the time, like the “imaginings of a sordid man.”
About a year later, I stumbled onto a chord progression and melody I liked and decided to try to craft lyrics from the entries in that nearly forgotten dream journal, adding another piece to the narrative that was taking shape. At first, I tried to limit myself to words I wrote in the journal, but eventually found I needed to stray outside it to fill things out. That said, it’s pretty faithful to what I wrote down upon waking.
A Few Words
Although I had the melody and chords for the track, it took weeks to craft the lyrics from the journal. After that, the song came together fairly quickly in Logic Pro.
I definitely had Bob Dylan in mind on this one, and the structure reflects that: unlike the other songs on the album, it has no middle eight — just four verses, a recurring refrain, and a long, haunted forward march.
As I listened, I suddenly heard how the keyboard line underneath the verses and choruses could swap places with the melody and interlock in an entirely different way. This became the extended middle section where the keyboard figure became the guitar lead over the melody.
Having heard this in my head, I then had to figure out how to create a 20 second gap in the track to drop the new section in. It was a Saturday afternoon. I ended up cancelling my evening plans and spent a good six hours learning how to create the gap and then recording the new harmony and guitar parts. The hours likely felt like minutes, the way time always flew when I worked on a song. You can also hear that first extended version with the new middle section—drums still off– in the vault.
After a long while, I got better at bending Logic’s drummer to my will. The ironic thing is, even though I eventually got it to play in time, I still couldn’t get the feel I wanted using Logic’s drummer. I wanted the track to have a certain spring in its step to match the feeling. For that, I hired a drummer I met of Fiverr. Sadly, I’ve lost his name. It’s the only song on the album that features a real drummer.
A favorite burger place in the Grove. Formerly an institution, I believe it recently closed because of rising rents.
The Vault
Demos · Alternate Takes · Behind the Curtain
A couple of rougher takes where I hadn’t quite landed on the final groove yet.
Early Demo
Original Short Version
An alternative, guitar-driven version. Sometimes I prefer this to the version that made the album. In the end, this stuck me as a bit too rough around the edges.
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Gray April Day
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