Track 05
My Evil Twin
Save My Love Tonight · cover art
Video coming soon · check back for the official track video
Its Place in the Story
Elizabeth Kübler-Ross famously identified five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. “My Evil Twin” covers two of those stages — denial and bargaining — after a sudden hemorrhage in the relationship.
After all, 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.
As the lyric from an unfinished song from that time put it:
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 putting 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 into 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 was gone forever.
No wonder, as the song goes, “I wish I could unsay what he said and 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, including bass and drums, that I attempted in Logic Pro. After toiling away for hours, and after hours of watching how-to videos, I still couldn’t get Logic’s drumming program to play in time. Thinking back, I was 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 timing of 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 to build a complete song. So I added bass, keyboards, guitars, and vocals and voila I had it: my first full band track within Logic Pro.
Listening to it now it sounds like what it is: the work of a total novice. But at the time I was thrilled. You can hear the track 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 the hardest track to get right on the album and it still isn’t. But it’s getting closer. The challenge with making your first, or any, album, a narrative album is that some parts are indispensable to the narrative and you’re sort of stuck with them unless you can write a different song to take its place.
If it wasn’t a narrative album I likely would have put aside My Evil Twin and River of Secrets for another time because they were so difficult to get right. Thankfully, the other songs either came together fairly easily once I got up to speed or occupied a reasonable middle ground. Those other two tracks did not.
On songwriting: To me, one of the most challenging and proudest moments in songwriting is coming up with a middle part that works. Often referred to as the “middle 8” because in traditional songwriting it typically took up 8 bars of the song, that name stuck no matter the length. It’s often mark by a minor chord shift in a song in a major key. As an example, I’ve always loved the middle 8 in Roy Orbison’s Oh Pretty Woman, a truly classic example of the technique.
As a songwriter you’ll often be sitting with a couple of good verses and choruses and the challenge is to write that middle part that, at the very least, doesn’t detract from the song and at the very best elevates it. I’m particularly fond of the middle eight in My Evil Twin. I hope it’s not “unseemly” or “uncool” to say so.
somewhere in Miami · one wild & precious word
The Vault
Demos · Alternate Takes · Behind the Curtain
Three early versions of the song, in roughly the order they came into being. Each one is a step closer to what eventually became the album track.
Early Demo
The solo-vocal version — me singing over Randy’s piano and organ arrangement, with acoustic guitar and cello, before a duet partner entered the picture.
Early Demo
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Gray April Day