'Carnival' - Unreleased SWORDS track

I gotta be honest, I was not expecting the outpouring of SWORDS love I received on Twitter yesterday. It had such a nebulous response initially. We spent years laboring over this thing, put it out into the world and then had no idea whether it was resonating with people or if they were even listening. The Spotify stats have always been decent but they're just metrics - no evidence that there's an actual person on the other end. It was so nice and almost overwhelming to hear all of the kind words.

Today I'm sharing an unreleased SWORDS track called Carnival.

I know, not an S-word. I wrote this song in 2018 after my Yia-Yia passed. I was one of the lucky few who made it into my late 20s having never experienced the loss of a loved one. The song is a direct response to that flavor of grief and also a reflection on my relationship with her.

For context, my Yia-Yia was my mom's mom. A small Greek woman who was profoundly religious and jovial. Her English was never 100% and she unnecessarily added syllables to many words. She called me "Nicolacos". My favorite memories are of her singing and dancing and laughing but she would also get distant and melancholy. My grandpa left her in the '70s and she never quite recovered mentally or otherwise. She lived alone for the remainder of her life and never learned to drive. You couldn't give her a dollar without her turning around and giving it to the church or somebody else. The more I reflect on her life the more sorrow it brings. She was an orphan who was brought to a strange country by a man who would later abandon her. Her kids were all she had. She lost a daughter, others moved away.

Despite all of the sorrow there was also immense joy. When I was 12, I was "making beats" with my cousin and we asked Yia-Yia to sing something for us. She immediately broke out into this goofy Yu-Ba-Ba-Ba-Boi song that we recorded on the spot. I've spent years trying to find out whether this is something she made up or if it was taken from another song.

Over the years, it became a song we would join in and sing along with her. My brothers and I drove to Florida to say goodbye before she passed and we sang it one last time with her along with the rest of the family surrounding her hospital bed. Beautiful memory!

She passed a few days later and I searched through old CDs trying to find the song she sang 15+ years earlier. I imported the track into Logic and began crafting this duet from the past / beyond the grave. A little spooky but was also great therapy.

It wasn't included on Swords for more than a few reasons:

1. I wasn't sure how it would be received without all of the context I just provided

2. Didn't feel right to have such a hyper-personal song on the record

3. I feel like it occupies the same space that Software occupies

We started making plans to release this after Spineless. Jon added his beautiful sax arrangement and Adam mixed it. But then Songs on the Computer started taking off and this song became homeless again. It felt especially misguided to drop this sincere ode to my actual grandmother amidst all these deranged songs about my fictional grandmother.

Hopefully this wasn't too sentimental. Thanks for listening!

Nick