Louise walked into the cottage in Hafnir, declared it mildly haunted, sat down at the deeply out of tune piano and wrote most of “All the Way Down” in a few minutes.  I was lying in the bathtub, desperately attempting to recover from the red eye flight and white knuckle drive that had landed us in the haunted cabin, but Lou’s piano instantly connected to something that was prowling around my notebooks:

And I will be with you
All the way down
All the way down

And I will be with you
As you crash and fall
Again and again

This is the blood on the blade of a friend

What followed was some mostly pain-free co-writing, with Louise mostly providing music and melody and me doing my lyric thing.  I had been playing a vaguely-Tom-Waits thing on my guitar that came to form the rhythmic heart of the verses, whereas Lou seemed to be pushing the choruses more towards something retro-poppy.  We ended up with a song that’s similar to “Jet Trails” insofar as it seems to be two different songs jammed together in one; the chorus doesn’t really relate to the verse (save for lyrically), and I think we’re sticking to “it made sense to us” as a decent rationale.

Production was a cross-continental affair; we needed a lot of help and got a lot of help from Amit Lissack on electric guitars, Rick McKay on electric bass, and we worked locally with the amazing Birgir Steinn on upright bass.