How "Ithaca" Was Written

Ithaca started as a song i had written purely on guitar, which is a rarity for me. the complex riff of the verses was something i was sitting on for years. my original first “complete” idea of the full song was recorded on my iphone.

after bringing it to aaron, he had ideas for how to tweak some of the form and vocal melody to make it congeal better and feel more ‘correct’. this involved fixing a “wrong” note in the melody to make it minor.

after sitting on that idea, we didn’t love changing the vocal melody, so we instead decided to change the chords to fit the original vocal melody. this helped us to land on the final idea, which you can hear below. this was also the first time where I had taken a version of the ORIGINAL ending and added it to all of our tweaking. Obviously on the final version, this ending became way larger.

i had the idea to actually live track two acoustics at the same time for this song to capture and honest performance. peter learned it so quickly and the results were really nice. i liked the idea of capturing this in a way that felt ‘woodsy’ or rustic and i think a live performance was better for that.