This first rough of Gang, called Open Evening at the time, was sketched out decades ago while drifting between addresses.
An initial spill of words was just aiming to capture a loose melody in its primary moment. Most wouldn’t survive except for a few seeds that subversively claimed territory.
A lone phrase dug in as a working title.
The song was eventually smeared in with other abandoned dry-runs from 1998 to 2005, resigned with their lyric placemarks jotted between traveling master plans.
After a recording project called Slingshot lost its drive, the collective title was simply changed to Hewn when it appeared to be a cursory stash that wasn’t going anywhere.
In 2006, a mockup was handed off for a remix as a last-ditch recovery, but was grounded again by other pursuits.
New material went on to compose the main body of the album Our Blood. The sequence left off with an open-ended thread of one-way dialogues. Open Evening found its muse here, rewritten after the rest of the tracks as Gang in 2011 — recorded last, specifically as a response prompted by its previous tracks’ states & meant as an afterthought of leading questions. The entitled lone phrase met up with its new direction as a mere reprising plural &, humbled, all the drifting finally stopped.
