January B-Side: That's How You Made Me Happy Again

Art by Billis Helg

Writing:

This was the first track I fleshed out for this four-track project. I came up with the vocal melody playing with my 4-month-old niece. Babies are a great test audience for songs - if they don’t like what they’re hearing, they’ll let you know pretty quickly. I tried to take that mentality with me, and make a song cheery and simple enough that you could sing it to a baby. 

As with “The Drum Strikes Back”, I was intentionally trying to write from the happier side of the spectrum, so when the time for lyrics came, I sat down and reflected on interactions with others in my life that had left me happier. I realized that the truest and brightest moments I’ve received from others have come not from gifts or favors they’ve bestowed on me, but from them falling upon some deep inner joy of their own. That sort of recollected, calm state is balm not just to the soul who feels it, but to everyone around them. I quickly bashed out an ode to this experience - a rather simple one, but earnest, and in keeping with the original idea of making a song for children. (The word “sylvan” comes from Fanny Crosby’s “The Flower Queen”, which was the original text I was singing to my niece.)

Recording:

This uses the same ‘virtual 8-track’ method I used with “The Drum Strikes Back”. I had the Beach Boys’ “Friends” album in mind for the arrangement - very sparse and unadorned, homey ingredients. For percussion, I used two pill bottles as shakers and my computer desk as a drum. You can hear my computer keyboard, which I’d left perched on my monitor, come crashing down as I enthusiastically reach the finale of the song.

1-2: Acoustic guitars

3-4: Vocals

5: Magnesium bottles

6: computer desk

7: piano

Lyrics:

That’s how you did it

That’s how you made me happy again

Your pensive mind clouded over your heart

A broken past with nowhere to start

Looking for answers, lost in the clouds

You can hear them talking but you can’t get out

How can you do it?

How can you make anyone happy again?

Then a sylvan beauty possessed your face

The hue of your eyes shifted to new shades

Like a field of roses when the sun breaks through

Or the night’s first stars coming into view

You told me it came with a gentle touch

There was a voice on the wind and it was whistling love

And just like that, the air was cool and clear

And nothing had changed except the need to fear

That’s how you did it

That’s how you made me happy again

Gentle persuasion tells me it’s true

The peace in me comes from the peace in you

The kindest gift that you ever gave

Is to love your pieces as they fall into place