10. Stepping Out

The Invisible Bridge

Welcome back again. This week I’m talking about the tenth track to be released from ‘You Could Be Happy’. It’s called ‘The Invisible Bridge’.

In real world news, a couple of exciting things to point you towards. Firstly, the awesome Plastic Magazine did a lovely review of the album, which you can look at by clicking on the link if you like that sort of thing. And secondly, as this is track ten, it’s time to release the fully mixed Second Sequence, which you might like to listen through to recap on this second act of the album, and marvel at it all fitting together like a satisfying musical jigsaw.

On having faith

The idea for this track is a pretty simple one. Lots of people of my age (ahem) will remember the scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Indie has made it as far as the grail temple, and has to pass three challenges to get as to the grail itself. I feel like I’m not alone in having very strong memories of this sequence - ‘…only the penitent man may pass…’, ‘…there’s no J in the latin alphabet!…’, and of course “… it’s a leap of faith…”. This latter challenge involves him crossing a chasm which appears to have no bridge, by stepping out into thin air. Except of course it’s not thin air, there’s a bridge there, it’s just sort of invisible.

So we are walking up to our invisible bridge in this track - or what appears from this side to be a chasm. Let’s recap what brought us here. The main character has travelled out of a place of difficulty in pursuit of a mission - to be happy. They have found themselves in difficult, challenging situations, but have made it almost to the end. I said last week that this was a sort of montage-y moment in the story, and it is, although I couldn’t for the life of me work out how to do that in music as it’s already been done so well you can’t really top it. So we’ll take that as read and say that our hero has got mostly to the end of where he’s going through a combination of luck, perseverance, hard work, patience, and a lot of help (to which we will return). Somewhere in this mix I think has to be faith as well. By faith, in this context I mean the ability to take a great big step into the unknown on the understanding that things could be better on the other side. But they might not be.

I don’t suppose there’s a big trick to explaining how this idea works in the context of the album, and maybe this feeling is familiar to some of you. Being in a situation where the work is done, the dragons are slain, the course is set, and you know what you need to do. But it still requires you to do it. Trust your path, cross the rubicon, pop the question… make the actual, life changing change. The risk is that you’ll be exposed, you’ll be wrong, you’ll look foolish, that it won’t work. It’s easier to live with the problems you know in the world that you’re used to, than risk letting go of it and being forced to deal with something new.

And maybe the extreme version is that you simply don’t believe. Every atom in your body is telling you not to take that big step, because it would involve something working that has never worked for you before. These are the kinds of steps that take genuine courage, and genuine faith. Doing something that seems like a terrible idea, because there is a chance of something untested being better, is terribly, terribly hard. You can’t really do that without some kind of faith - in an idea, or maybe a person.

But after all that, there is a reason hindsight is 20:20, which is that it’s normally right. And often when I have taken these kinds of steps in my life, not only have none of my fears ever really come to pass, but the future I’ve stepped into is infinitely better than I could possibly have imaged from the other side of the bridge. Screw your courage to the sticking place, as my mother used to say, and take the step.

There is more than a bridge

Musically, this track is where a lot of the album comes together. The track starts as you would expect, with the hero on their own represented by a solo synth line. They are nervous, unsure, and unwilling to take a step. A repeated piano melody starts to drive them forward, and they walk, first slowly, and then with increasing purpose. After two minutes or so, you’ll here the melody - the hero - pick up the ‘hope’ theme that we heard first way back in You Could Be Happy, initially as two simple notes.

Then a few seconds later, something big happens. The orchestra arrives. I think I’d suggest you listen to this track on headphones. The first part of it, up until that point, is deliberately almost complete mixed in mono, and the second part from the orchestra’s entrance expands quite suddenly into very wide stereo. Don’t worry too much if you’re not sure exactly what those words refer to - maybe just see if you can hear it on a pair of headphones. The effect I hope I managed to achieve was the music equivalent to Dorothy leaving behind black and white Kansas and turning up in technicolour Oz.

The orchestra is, of course, another character. We have seen this person so many times up until now, but maybe always a little bit in disguise. There was a chink of daylight in the middle of ‘Breaking it’ before things fell apart; there was a voice of support trying to break through the mist in ‘The Curtain’; a messenger - a tiny bird - whispering the main message in the ear of the hero in ‘You Could Be Happy’; and there they were again carrying the bulk of the weight through the wilderness in ‘Everything You Need’.

I’ve been referring to the main character in this story as ‘the hero’, but in fact I think it’s really the orchestra who is the hero here. It is the orchestra who has helped, supported, cared for, and carried the main character through everything that is hard, and who has given them the hope they needed to follow the mission to its conclusion. And in this track so much comes together. The hope theme becomes part of the solo melody as the main character learns to carry hope inside them, and the orchestra comes in alongside to join that journey and add even more joy to the new world we’re entering across the bridge.

It’s here we see the orchestra for who they really are; not a voice, or a tiny bird, or a helping hand, but a glorious burning fiery angel who eclipses every other thing in the world, with hope and the promise of something better.

This isn’t a story about one person. It’s a story about two people.

Maybe this is a love story.

What next?

Glad you asked! Firstly, thanks for reading this far. You’ve already been part of the creative journey of this album, and I very sincerely thank you for paying attention. All I’d really like is for people to listen and be part of what I’ve made. Job done. However, if you have friends or people you think would enjoy this, please encourage them to sign up to these updates via www.thesixteenth.net. It would mean a lot. And maybe actually listen to the songs in whatever way you enjoy!

You can listen to the music here, or through the links below.