The Story Behind One Dance Left

The Alternate Routes One Dance Left

Its hard to know what a song is about, even if its yours.   When I sat down to write One Dance Left I didn’t know what it would be.  Its like trying to determine an persons personality when they are just born.  But I can tell you how it felt and I can tell you how it feels now.  As I go through life, I’m learning that I don’t know anything, but the way I feel can become known, is more tangible, and more important to me if I’m being honest.

The first time I heard “All My Friends” by LCD Soundsystem I was at a party, feeling no pain.  I had lost a bunch of weight and I was rediscovering what it feels like to celebrate my own shape, in my own body.  I took most of my clothes off and put on the plastic circular orb suit that happened to be laying in the corner of the field where the party was.

(it was a good party….)

Tim and Taryn Bubble Suits

I started dancing, and my friend, Taryn, joined me in the yard.

We were running,

in circles.

It was a moment I will never forget.  The next day I wrote most of what would become “One Dance Left.”

When you sit down to write a song, you can know how you’re feeling, you can think you know what you want to say, but its harder to know why.

I don’t know why that song came on at that party, I don’’t why I finally found a way to lose the weight, and shed some of the grief I had been carrying in that moment.  I don’t know why Kurt Leon is becoming a master of the recording studio before my eyes, or why…no matter how finished I think I am with an idea, its never really done until Eric Donnelly invents an electric guitar part and 30 other ideas you can barely hear, but would completely miss if they were absent in the track.  I don’t why Ian seems to know every style of bass playing there is, and always choses the right one to assign to each one of these new songs so well… I don’t know why Taryn understands that moment at that party for me, in a way that very few people in my life ever could, and why.. when we howl the high notes in the middle of the song together, it feels like a continuation of a announcement we’ve both made in other lifetimes.  I don’t know why my wife knew the exact time to let me know that this song, needed to get released as close to the way we discovered it as possible because of the feeling of it.

Maybe we don’t get to know why.  But I know how it feels thanks to all of the above. and it feels like One Dance Left.

Enjoy,

Tim ‘AR 2018