Folks who I’m close with know that I have an band called The Cancellations, started several years ago with my partner Joe and one of our best friends, Derek Brady. Derek was a killer guitarist & all-around wonderful weirdo. He passed away a couple months before we moved to Nashville in 2018. I’d held out hope that we’d convince him to move with us and make this goofy project a reality at some point.
Well, we lost Derek, we played our first gig without him–at his memorial–and then we moved here, and something in me kind of snapped. I started writing a lot more. I write some songs for myself, and some songs for our band, and some songs just for him.
The Cancellations will be a thing, at least one record’s worth of thing, because it just has to be. Because I have so many ways to remember Derek, but I want to remember that he pushed me to keep creating when I was just over music. And I can’t thank him for that any other way than making it, I guess.
This song wasn’t supposed to be a Cancellations song, but once we got our brother-from-another-mother DanO on drums (and arranging, and cowriting lyrics) and the incredible Carley Baer on backing vocals, it just felt like it belonged in the repertoire. I can only imagine the textural & wailing guitar work Derek would have put into this. When that last chorus kicks in, if I’m in the right mindset, I feel like I can actually hear it, and I get chills.
Oh, also, this song is about the Star Trek TNG episodes Chain of Command. But if you care about that sentence at all, you knew that from the title.
Listen to “Four Lights” by Ellie Maybe & the Cancellations on:
Bandcamp • Spotify • Apple Music
Listen to more amazing & spooky music created this year on the Official Dark Songs 2020 Playlist.
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