little baby

when god sends you a dear friend, you thank him profusely. when god sends you a dear friend who also happens to be a hitmaker with phenomenal melodic sense, you thank him profusely and completely exploit her time, abilities and ideas all in the name of your year long song-a-week project. this is just what i've done.

ashlee house, of asher in the rye fame, is someone i think i was fated to meet. really. on a whim, she moved to logan, UT and into a room in the house i was living in circa 2007-2008. i had no idea what to expect. all i knew is that José González spilled out from the crack beneath her door on a loop for a solid two weeks before we had uttered more than a few salutations to one another. i also knew that we shook hands when we met. neither of these two things gave me any insight into what would become a ridiculously honest and musically eloquent relationship that means a lot to me. we spent so much time sorting out melodies, telling the truth, finding harmonies, humorously altering lyrics, putting each other in our places that such formalities (shaking hands, small talk) are distant, almost foreign, memories to me.

i love how ashlee and the songs that she writes are simple, but with a sleight-of-hand twist. you think you've got her or her song figured out and then you're asking "hey, how'd she do that? how'd she move me so far with so few words, so few chords?" ahhh, but they are so often perfectly placed. sometimes she speaks in lines worthy of a movie script, so you can imagine that with additional thought, the songs she sings even surpass her real-time wisdom. luckily, she brought the beginning of a beautiful song today and graciously allowed me to alter parts and even write the second verse. she sings for us this week with a voice that i think shoves formality to the side and invites you to believe her.

this song was inspired by another mutual and dear friend of ours who is the friend of mine i consider most built for success. her focused aspirations had made her seem invincible to me, so while it's sometimes surprising and difficult to find she is human, it is also reassuring and makes our friendship more real than it ever could be. for me, in a way this is an ode to self-doubt, discovery, confusion, and struggle. more than that, it is a promise that we will keep going in spite of these things.

naturally, i forgot my recording equipment so we recorded this live, mostly; very lo-fi with the internal mic in ashlee's laptop on garageband. we recorded the tambourine afterward. please forgive the quality and the occasional mistake.

ashlee: main vocals, song structure, second guitar
julia: harmony, guitar, tambourine

little baby


little baby,
don't give up on yourself,
little baby,
don't you remember when we were the happiest
we've ever been?
and we ran through the water
with our hands held so tight
abandoned the dead body and we left in the night

and all in all it was an even trade
for the mess we made
things never went the way we planned them
as we sat there we demand them
from the god who saved us until labor day.
it was the price we paid.

little baby,
call yourself yours tonight
little baby,
don't you remember when we were such a mess?--
never again.
and we swam through the dark like it was mud,
promised ourselves that we'd get unstuck

can you hear me now? it was an even trade
for the mess we made
things never went the way we planned them
as we sat there we demand them
from the god who saved us until labor day.
it was the price we paid.