💌 Liner Notes: Cascade

An insight into how the song was made, from first demo to final product.

Welcome to Liner Notes! The insight into each song on my debut album, Typical Forever. Liner Notes shows the story behind making these songs, the stories that couldn’t fit in a CD booklet or a Bandcamp credits section.

🏔 Cascade

‘Cascade’ is the second single off of my geology album, Typical Forever. And it’s one of my favourites.

It dropped last week on all music platforms, so if you haven’t had a listen yet, go hit play and use it as the background for reading this email.

I didn’t actually think this song would make it to the album. It lingered in the voicenotes and idea stages for quite a while before I actually ended up taking it seriously enough to finish it…

🌱 How Did It Start?

I just had a melodic idea. If you listen to the voice memo below, you’ll hear that I was playing around with a much faster tempo verse, in a higher part of my register.

If you can’t make out any words it’s probably because I was singing gibberish, trying out different sounds in different places to see what words wanted to come out and when.

The chorus is solidifying by the end of this passage, and I kept that. But the verses needed more work.

I liked the word Cascade. And I wanted to write a song about rocks tumbling down the mountain. I had read about something called the ‘sedimentary cycle’ which is rocks being weathered down to sand and eventually travelling into the ocean to become compressed and turning into rock again. I made this page in my notebook which is the first ever evidence of this song:

✏️ Writing The Song

Honestly… there’s not really a super-interesting story to this songwriting apart from one element of it.

Sometimes songs just pour out of you in one go and there’s not much analysis you can do about that process. And that’s what I feel like happened with Cascade… but as I said, apart from the bridge.

The bridge is that middle moment in the song where it departs for a moment to some sort of emotional revelation or insight. For so long I was trying to figure out what to say. I wanted to really get to the heart of the narrator. This rock was desperate to be changed! It wanted to tumble down the hillside and be compressed into sediment! It wanted to be elevated again into a mountaintop!

At first I wanted to be quite literal about the process of compaction and compression:

The bottom section was my first idea. Compaction! Put me down! What was I, a sickly dog? It didn’t really do the job.

The top section was my second idea. I kept the ‘put me down’ but squeezed it in as a passing phrase: put me down and elevate me.

But I still didn’t like the negative connotations of being ‘put down’ in order to be elevated again. Also, staying still is suffocating was a bit of a ‘meh’ line to me, it didn’t really have much to say.

I met a friend and a really great songwriter called Benjamin Scheuer and we went over the songs. When I presented him the problem of the ‘Cascade’ bridge, he suggested I just keep it open for now. Just keep playing the chords over and over and try different things. I didn’t have to have anything set in stone until I was literally recording the vocals in the studio.

So I did that. I worked on it but didn’t let it solidify until we were days away from recording the song. And even in the studio I had to have my lyrics up because I hadn’t got it memorised yet.

I ended up with this:

All I’ve ever known

Is waiting, watching, wishing, hoping

Let me go where rivers go

Hold the door and leave it open

I kept the ‘let me go where rivers go.’ Honestly a lot of this bridge ended up being words and sounds which acted as a vehicle for singing big notes. When you listen to the song you can hear the emphasis: “ALL I’ve ever known, is waiting watching, wishing, HOPING, LET me GO where rivers GO” — like, the stress is lying on these “aw” and “oh” sounds which are great to place on big notes. Just manages to shove a bunch of emotion and climax in there, which is what you want for a bridge, before you bring it down… to bring it back up again.

🪩 Listen… Now!

Hoo boy. Now that you have an idea of where the song came from, how about listening to ’Cascade’?

✨ Bonus song: if you like this song, then you might like some of the songs from a side project I did with my friend Hannah Fredsgaard-Jones, called Missed Connections. Check out the songs here.

📖 Up Next: The Story Behind The Song

Every song starts with a lived experience. And there are so many experiences in my life that I tell through the story of ‘Cascade.’ But I think I want to tell a story from ten years ago, when I moved to Canada, and thought my whole life would change…

Missed the previous post? Check out my announcement for ‘Cascade’ last week:

Typical Forever: Album Status

🔓 Single 1:🏛️ Earthquake Room [status: unlocked!]

🔓 Single 2: 🏔️ Cascade [status: unlocked!]

🔐 Single 3: 🌊 ▓▓▓▓▓ ▓▓▓▓ ▓▓▓▓▓ ▓▓▓▓▓ [status: in the vault]

🔐 Single 4: 🗺️ ▓▓▓▓ ▓▓ ▓▓▓▓ [status: in the vault]

🔐 Album: 🌋 Typical Forever [status: 25% unlocked]

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Til next time! Be good,

Olivia 🌈✨🏔🎶