Spencer Krug Fading Graffiti (Indie Exclusive)

This recording is a full-band rearrangement of the original— a solo piano & vocals ballad posted to Patreon in April of 2019, now turned rock song. It is about memory. It’s about the past and how the past sometimes calls for us, but we can’t go back to it. It’s about how events are stamped in time, but not necessarily our minds.Some of my earliest memories are of the giant willow tree that stood in the yard of my childhood, looming over the house. I still see this huge yellow tree all the time in my mind’s eye, but it’s always changing, always a bit different. This is referenced in the first verse of the song. Another set of memories are from when I said goodbye to my grandfather in a hospital: the order of his last words to me, my sister standing on the opposite side of the bed, the elevator doors closing… I want to remember all of this in detail, but I’m not sure that’s possible. This is what the second verse is about. Memories come randomly to me when I’m sitting at the piano, mindlessly playing. It’s a kind of meditation, and as I noodle away events from the past float in and out of my skull, morphing and conflating with one another. A teenage road trip arrives at last year’s swimming hole; mind-mush. It’s as if the notes act as doorways for the memories to slip in and out, and they swim around together in my head like snakes in a well. This is more or less what I’m going on about in the third verse. This is one of my favorite tracks on the LP because its metamorphosis from a slow piano ballad into the groovy number you now hear was one of the most profound transformations that occurred while remaking songs for this album. The two versions are entirely different, yet both, I think, work.