KLANGSTOF

I remember getting back from the last tour of 2010 and writing the main guitar riff to Colombia, thinking it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever written. I was in Mel and my old apartment across the street from Red Lion in Silverlake, and I tried to show somebody it on New Year’s Eve, but it was hard to get anyone to pay attention (seems completely understandable now). After my mother passed away in the summer of that year, it immediately made sense that I’d write a song about her using that riff. Life connects the dots for you sometimes and I was at least thankful for that.

We wrote a few different beats for Colombia, so there are even other alternate versions of it besides the 8-minute version we’re releasing today (Ryan eventually won out with an 808 beat he wrote, which we then layered with Matt playing drums with mallets, which is what you hear on the record). I had a lot of fun writing those synth and fake string swells on the 8-minute version, but when we cut it basically in half and trimmed any fat off of it we could, they didn’t make sense anymore. I remember being bummed at the time, but looking back I think editing the song down made it stronger, another example of always learning from each other. I still got strings on it in the end though. Aaron got his brother Bryce to write a bunch of different orchestrations for the record, but I think the ones he threw in for Colombia was our favorite. He arranged violins playing up and down the neck at different times, creating a weird siren effect. He sent them in at the last minute when we were mixing, and it just totally gave the end of the song the gravitas it was missing.

The day after my mom passed away, my aunt Sushma and I were on the balcony and saw a hummingbird fly into the window, completely stunning itself into some sort of paralysis and fell onto a sofa cushion. It felt so fragile once I picked it up, and we were already so emotionally fraught, it immediately felt as if my mother came back as a hummingbird to get back into the house. I think in moments like that you instinctively try to connect any dots that make sense, because death doesn’t make sense. So that’s why we decided to name the album Hummingbird. We wanted something to represent how we felt at that time, and with some of our relationships in disarray, random panic attacks surfacing, us parting ways with one of our founding members, and my mother’s passing, I think we wanted to make some sense of all these profound changes we’d never asked for. And something like an analogy to my mother’s spirit living on felt like a beautiful way to express that searching.