19. More Earth Than Sea

Lauren Dunn, Terrell Hall, Momo Greenwell - 2025 LIU Rehearsal

This might be the most personal song in the show.  It plays like a love song to a love that’s already over. Tender, nostalgic, and quietly unbearable.

For the first time, we let the full truth of Vincent and Sien’s relationship exist without filters.

When we hit the chorus, the meter shifts from 3/4 to 4/4. The change is not metronomically equal. It just stops and becomes something else. (Yes, some of the musicians absolutely gave me side-eye for that.) But that’s how truth shows up in relationships. Abrupt, unsmoothed, and impossible to transition into gracefully.

The strings drift through the verses in small, brushstroke ideas. Some are genuinely beautiful. Some are intentionally uncomfortable. One is meant to feel like tape being reversed. Memory rewinding against its will. Maggy Simon, who plays violin on the album, was almost sight-reading this. She hadn’t been part of the LIU run, but she instinctively understood the emotional logic immediately. She added these gloriously over-the-top glissandi that I’d been hearing in my head from the beginning. Absolute dream execution.

Grace McNally & Kayla Joya - 2025 LIU

Erica Enriquez - 2023 NYTF

We land the chorus in a new key that’s almost imperceptible at first. Another quiet mirror of a relationship slipping into a different phase before you realize you’ve crossed a line you can’t uncross.

I knew I wanted one of the guitars running through a Leslie cabinet. Or, realistically with our budget, a rotor pedal. I nearly lost my mind when the studio casually mentioned they had a Leslie and were totally fine running Eitan’s guitar through it. I full-on felt like the Beatles for a moment.

The final chorus…when the drums come in and the strings finally let go…is one of my favorite moments on the entire record. After a take, I hit the god mic and said, “Griff, can we make the fill a little more unnecessarily complicated? Kinda like Matt Cameron?”

“Sure.”

What he played next was exactly the fill that had been living in my brain.

Dude’s a machine.