The track that taught me the most is still untitled. It is still being worked on. Its something too precious to be vague about in my lyrics and musically, too moving when I’ve had piano, to give some movement to begin to take this song into its next phase.
It’s mostly how do I honour this song, the reason behind it, when you have lost everything you love when you lose someone. For me, its my twin sister Anya, who passed away from cancer.
When I began, it was the lyrics that began to break me. Each time I returned to them, they were from somewhere so deep that they made me cry. Trying to move past that I reworked them. Over and over. They are still waiting for me to return to. And I am a frequent visitor, I come back, but I’m not strong enough to trust myself with it, I can’t second guess either because I haven’t been able to take it any further, without being emotionally overwhelmed by the lyrics. In one way I’m glad for that because it means that I obviously captured my moments in the lyrics. Perhaps thats the problem, its too close.
Musically, I had options but eventually returned to just piano to get some composition in order to change the perspective of the lyrics, thinking that would help move me away from the impact of the words and move ahead; so Peter worked with me, we experimented with 3 ways this could go. One was my ballads, second was more liberating with a free open ended melody, and thirdly, was just piano. Peter knows me completely, and knows the whole story Anya is. She is completely beautiful. Even he knew when to say, Suzie, you need to let yourself be. Its not a battle, its that its not a battle, because there is no fight left, instead its a desire to be present in this song and acknowledge, we, Anya and I, both had to stop fighting and accept what was going to be.
I had to strip back every thing, and start at 1 thing that was to settle the emotions. Every thing I wrote has humbled me because initially I said that I got it wrong, but I haven’t even got it right yet. So, as I continue with it, after writing began 8 months ago, I’m still back there, I’m still in that time of my life with all the circumstances that surround the reason for this song.
I don’t know that it will ever be “finished”, because it has taught me that it is a chameleon, it changes each time I return to it.
In that way, its living, its breathing. The difficulty has been that its breath taking - meaning it leaves me without one, the tears are always there in the song, and they make themselves known to me each time.
Eventually, I imagine that I will honour her, Anya, and us, and everything that needs to be released but it will do it in its own time. Meanwhile, Anya sits with me each time I come back.
This link is to ESCAPE BY SUZANNE SIEBERT. Written for Anya anniversary of passing, a week before our birthday. Her funeral was the day before our birthday. Being identical twins is a blessing, I would never want to change it.