Perennial

No pun intended: "Perennial" was the seed from which Sisyphus grew.

This song was originally written to a prompt as part of a fundraiser reward. For the past 15 years, I've helped throw a room party at MarsCon in Minnesota (come hang out with me at Space Oddity Music Club & Brew Pub if you're ever at the con) - and for almost as long, we've run a fundraiser to help defray its costs (geeks drink a lot of beer and eat a lot of cheese). Occasionally, as an incentive at the highest donation levels, I would cover a song of the donor's choice or write an original song on a topic or prompt of their choosing. I don't offer rewards like this anymore; they're a lot of work, it always takes longer than I want it to for me to get the reward to the backer, and at times I've felt like the end product didn't live up to my personal standards. "Perennial," however, was the exception that proves the rule: the one time I felt confident that I'd both fulfilled the request and written an objectively good song.

The tattoo in question

The friend who earned this perk through her generous donation to Space Oddity requested a song on the topic of change, and also asked that the song incorporate themes of psychological, emotional, and seasonal change. She shared photos of a tattoo she'd gotten - an intricate back piece of botanical images - and wrote eloquently about the circumstances that had led her to commission this other piece of deeply personal art, to inscribe it permanently on her body, and to add to it little by little over time. For her, each addition to the tattoo corresponded to a new chapter in her story and a milestone in an ongoing journey of self-discovery. Sometimes this process was wrenchingly painful, accompanied by the loss of relationships or shifts in personal circumstances. Yet the tattoo's leaves and flowers also seemed to represent her ability to grow and to blossom even in tough times - not unlike a perennial plant that flowers again every spring no matter how long and cold the winter before it might be.

I sat with all of these thoughts for a few months before I started writing the song. A wide-open prompt like the one I'd been given is a blessing and a curse in that it gives your creativity free rein to move once it's gotten started, but finding a way into the topic can sometimes take longer just because of how many options there are. Ultimately I took an unusual (for me) approach to the composition. Most of the time I'm a "lyrics first" kind of songwriter, but "Perennial" was initially built around the opening acoustic guitar riff which was something I'd spent a number of years noodling on during sound checks without really expecting it would turn into a song. Once I combined that with as many plant growth metaphors as I could think of, the rest of it came together quickly from there.

The recipient was very happy with the demo of "Perennial" that I sent her. I was happy with it too, but it took a while for me to be clear on how it fit with the rest of my material. At the time that I wrote it in 2015, most of my musical output was focused on revising the songs for The Hero's Journey™ (which, as a concept album, had a strictly defined track list already) or making parody and comedy music singles for the Funny Music Project. Yet it had a way of continually sneaking into our set lists at live shows, largely because my violin player Elizabeth liked it a lot too. (Elizabeth also made an important contribution to this song by suggesting changes to the arrangement that smoothed out what was originally a quite jarring harmonic transition from the chorus back into the verse; I'm incredibly grateful for her input.)

After we finished and released The Hero's Journey™ in 2019 and started thinking about our next recording project, "Perennial" kept coming up, not unlike its namesake. By that time I had accumulated a number of unreleased "serious" original songs that seemed like they might fit together well on a record, and in early 2020 we started having in-depth conversations about what this "serious album" might look like. The final track list of Sisyphus is quite different from the ones we sketched out in those initial meetings, but one thing that didn't change was making "Perennial" the opening track. Hope felt easier for me to access back in 2015 (or maybe just less fraught), and the song reflects that with its big choruses and major-key vibes. I think it's important to have that aspect of the topic represented, even if it feels more aspirational at times. Sometimes it really is as simple as waiting to see what will grow back, and trusting that something can and will bloom again.

(Thank you to A. for giving me permission to write about her song request and to share the photo of her tattoo along with this blog post - and for all her support of Space Oddity over the years.)