Across The Coals (single release)
On October 16th, my band Waxlimbs released our first single in nearly 3 years, Across The Coals.
It's a speedy, grimy rock song with a lot of chromaticism in it, and is a bit of a departure from our grander "cinematic" style. I'm going to take this post to outline how the song came to be.
In early 2022, I got a Revv G20 amplifier. It brought a burst of songwriting with it, and in a week I had a bunch of new guitar-based demos for Waxlimbs handy. The first was Across The Coals, the second was Need, written a few days later.
Need came out in December of 2022; less than a year later. Across The Coals ended up on the cutting room floor, until Olivia picked it back up and wrote new lyrics for it and sketched out a new arrangement.
For the most part, the song was "written" as far back as 2023, but something still wasn't right.
Waxlimbs up until this point had a song-gestation process like so:
- Write demo in the studio
- Refine
- Mix and master
- Release
- Learn how to play it live.
In the time since From The Garden in 2023, we decided we wanted to make sure we had played our songs live at least a few times before releasing them. This way, any efficiencies or exciting changes we wanted to make via the live process could make it into the final recording.[1]
Most of the time, this would result in a song becoming 10-15bpm faster.
Across The Coals marked the first song we've taken this route for. The result is a more natural-feeling arrangement (to us), and a final mix that feels a bit more "live", since we opted to mostly include elements that we'd actually use on stage rather than rely totally on ear candy and studio magic.
This song and one other (still in the production pipeline) make up a kind of interstitial period for us. The songs that make up our album Where Lilies Grew were all written and released as singles in 2020-2021, and happen to form a record we're very proud of. Once that project came to a close, we were searching for a new approach that would define the next thing we did. Singles presented a way for us to "get good" at songwriting and only put out work we were proud of, and avoid the problem of album filler.
It has been 4 years since the songwriting process for Where Lilies Grew wrapped, and I think we're finally ready to write an album. Across The Coals marks the intermission, and we can't wait to show you what comes next, when the time is right.[2]