It’s Over was one of the last songs I wrote for This Is A Photograph. A song who showed up late to the party but felt like a much needed puzzle piece to complete the record.
I had the lyrics and general idea for the song floating around for months but it really came together when spending time in my friend Gretas practice space and sitting at her upright piano for long periods of time.
There’s a stretch of I-40 through Arkansas that I would drive when making my way from Kansas City to Memphis during the pandemic that I came to know and love. It was usually foggy and always very rural and very beautiful. It was also always littered with DIY TRUMP art and confederate flags.
This is common in middle America I suppose and you eventually get somewhat desensitized but never completely. Natural beauty acts as a back drop to the conservative memorabilia and advertisements in the foreground. But these signs were different than the ones I would often see around Kansas City. Most of them were homemade and done with great detail and care.
I would sometimes wonder if I saw all this homemade art on the side of the highway - lets call it folk art - spray painted on hay barrels and drift wood - out of context, if I would think it was beautiful. I would also wonder if the people who made them knew that they were artists.
But I of course did have all the context, and the art was a stain on what should only be a perfectly scenic winding highway through one of Americas most beautiful states.
I did a lot of reflecting on those drives, partly in silence, as I would lose cell service about an hour outside of Memphis. My mind would oscillate between the natural beauty of Arkansas and the DIY propaganda, and everything in-between.
I reflected on headlines. “Will Smith Shares terrifying video of California fires near his home”. A friend of mine had once worked catering at a party at Will Smiths house and told me he had a room with leather floors. I wondered if the house caught fire if the leather would smell like a burning meat.
I thought of Cassie and our time in the Babies, a very innocent time to be a rock band traveling around America, cutting our teeth during the Obama years, it suddenly seemed. I thought of Cory and being young together in New York. I thought of all the birds, confused by new weather patterns as they wondered which way to migrate - lost in a never ending murmuration.
Texas froze and went off the power grid around that time and people were being told to fill their bath tubs with snow to use later as drinking water. Ted Cruz had fled the state when the state went black, famously leaving his dog alone in his freezing home.
I thought about all of this, often on this specific stretch of I-40, and wanted to make sure to have a time and place for them on the album. This Is A Photograph is of course a very nostalgic record, a record which looks to the past for clues and comfort, but it felt wrong - or impossible - to write an album in and around 2020 and not reflect the current state of things, at least a little bit.
So It’s Over became the song where I put those feelings.
Here’s two demos.
One at Gretas piano,
and another, on a 12 string guitar. This version is almost an entirely different song that I had all but forgotten about.