"From the desk of the self-appointed tiny folk band fan club president (Alabama chapter) I am listening to the new CD for the first time as I type this. Because you care, I thought I would share my thoughts...
"Take me with you is awesome folk music at its best. The harmonies sound great."
--Larry Jelley, Self-Appointed Tiny Folk Band Fan Club President (Alabama Chapter)
Well, shucks. Thanks, Larry. And thanks to all of you for sticking with us as we've gone through and given some background on our newest EP, "Cardboard and Christmas Lights." Today we reach the last track we're featuring because it's the last track on the EP. It's called "Take Me With You."
Maybe you've been in a relationship before. Maybe you've wanted that relationship to work out. But maybe that relationship is hard to navigate sometimes and you both get angry with each other and maybe say some things that you regret. And then one of you slams the door and leaves the room or goes for a walk around the block. What you learn if you've ever been in a relationship like that, is that the getting angry and the hard work isn't always bad, but the leaving is. Maybe you've been there before?
This song started late one night in a roomful of moving boxes in a house that needed to be cleaned. Just a verse and a chord progression. It sat on an iPhone through a bunch of touring and some temporary housing and a really hard year. There were things we carried from house to house in those moving boxes that had no real place in our lives anymore; notes from college classes, receipts for items we'd never return, queen size mattress warranty information, bumper stickers I never got around to putting on my car because I never put bumper stickers on my car. And like those items piled up, got shoved away and moved around, so did a lot of the feelings we'd been carrying around for the past few years. And so when we found ourselves accidentally dating and living in a yellow, three bedroom house, with a roommate who didn't know we had accidentally started dating, it was like we had opened up all our boxes of repressed feelings and dumped them out onto the kitchen floor to stub our toes on while we were making dinner.
There was one night (I forget what we were having but I remember it looked delicious) where we sat down to eat in the middle of an argument (I also forget what we were arguing about, but I remember it was a doozy) and never got to eating. That because I (this is Scott writing if you couldn't tell from all the run-on sentences) slammed my utensils down on the table, stood up and walked out the front door. I didn't make it very far, not even around the block. I just walked angrily back and forth in front of the neighbor's front yard, carrying on an argument of grunts and mutters, but when I returned, Mallory was still sitting at the table, her food untouched, waiting for me with loaded eyes. I had cooled off a bit in my time outside and I apologized for the argument we had just had and that "I shouldn't have gotten angry about that." And that was when I realized, she was no longer mad about the argument, but she was furious that I had just left in the middle of it. Furious might be the wrong word. Hurt might be better. "Next time you feel like leaving, take me with you," she said.
And that, kids, is how you write a chorus.
The song was finished very quickly after that and has been part of our live show ever since.
"Take Me With You" is a song about not walking out. It's a song about being together, even when the GPS has stopped working and you have no idea where you're going. It's about repairing that stairway to one another when all you've got are splinters and a glue stick. It's about reading under the same nightlight and going to bed at the same time. It's the friction of two people who've found it's better to argue together than to be angry separately and it's about learning to argue more kindly. It's about carrying the other person with you, especially when it's hard. This is a love song we realized we'd been writing for years, before we knew that all of this following one another around the country was how love songs get written.
You can take this song with you by listening on Spotify or by getting your own copy of Cardboard and Christmas Lights at www.theroughandtumble.bigcartel.com.