"Silver Maple" was born in spring of 2014. We were sitting on the front porch of our yellow house, mulling over the difficult winter we'd had. We'd just moved into our little yellow house with our roommate, Mike, and our dog, Butter. The month before, we'd lost a friend from Chattanooga-- a fellow musician, and one of our first friends we'd met on the road. The tragedy was thick that spring, the questions turning around and around-- what could we have done? Should we have called him more? Should we have visited?
Suicide leaves no room for answers. But on that early May day, sitting on our front porch, the tree in our yard was blooming. We hadn't noticed it in its early stages. But raw and underslept and overworked, we noticed it now. A silver maple was growing in our yard. And it was spectacular to see its life pushing out of the rough, gray limbs.
We didn't include "Silver Maple" on We Made Ourselves a Home When We Didn't Know, even though if fit the theme. Maybe we thought the record was too long already. Maybe it was hard to place this story among the other degrees of tragedy and hope, since this song is at once the very worst and the very best of us. But we are delighted to share it now. We've been playing it since late summer of 2014, with these couple of videos to prove it (Thanks, Andrew Carroll and Daniel McCord). Even if not included on the record, it was a song we needed to play, again and again to help quiet our minds. And it is a favorite of lots of folks who have come to see us live (including Scott's mom). It's morphed in meaning, bringing us hope in our further losses. Occasionally, it's even changed into a pretty little song to sing-- a testament to time and the arduous work of remembering a person's love over a person's darkness.
We've stashed it in a category on our Bandcamp page called "Odds and Ends for the End of the World"-- a few scrappy bits we add to occasionally to give you something new, and give us a place to put our extra feelings.
We hope this little tune will bring a little sliver of light into your day, too.
The embedded link below will have you listening right away, or follow this link to download it for free, or pay what you want: