Blue Night came from a small snippet of poetry that I had jotted down or maybe posted on Twitter and then printed out as possible lyrics. Rosalie said it sounded like a lullaby, which I initially rejected (that’s just a knee-jerk reaction for me), but then later thought, well, why not? It does sound a little like a lullaby. We had discussed it several times, and then I fleshed out the words some. We recorded the background for this song at my apartment with Rosalie at the keyboards, and me in front of my desk with my guitar. One of the things I love about this song is the synergy and the improvisation. We played around with a couple of different piano settings before Rosalie settled on the more organ-like sound, and I had found an interesting riff to explore, and then we just played with no heed to what the melody might be, or how much time we needed.
During this kind of improvisation, I sink into the music and stop hearing it so much as seeing it due to the fact that I have a form of synesthesia which makes reading music (visual) extremely challenging for me. When I improvise, I can see the shapes of music, and the movement, and I can see how what I’m doing fits into it geometrically, but there’s no easy translation for what I see with what is written as typical musical notations. So we played and when we got to the end, I say, “Okay,” which I left in the track. That was the take.
I worked on the vocals a few days later, struggling to find the sound that would go with the background, working by ear, and growing increasingly frustrated until, with a slight adjustment in how I was seeing my vocals, I tuned into where and how I wanted the melody to go into the shape of the music Rosalie and I had created together. The background vocals took more redoing, and fussing with the mixing and whatnot, but the main body of this song was put together swiftly.~ Wendy Kheiry
Emotionally, this song is a testament to how even close, soulmate relationships don’t completely expunge the feelings of sadness and isolation people can experience. Sometimes all we can do is sit with someone through those times in a comfortable companionship that you wish would always be there, even if it includes the ever-present Blues.”
