This one comes from my album It Takes One Drop.
I actually started Come Up for Air on an old four-track recorder, probably sometime in the ’90s or early 2000s. I loved that thing. I squeezed a lot of music out of it before it finally gave up the ghost after years of abuse.
By then, I had moved on to SONAR and was taking my first shaky steps into the world of MIDI, virtual instruments, sound editing and mixing. I was learning as I went — and, frankly, I’m still learning.
What makes this song interesting to me is that I had an existing song and decided to see what would happen if I produced the hell out of it.
So I did.
Maybe a little too much.
There are layers upon layers of experimentation in this one. Some of it works. Some of it probably wanders pretty far into “Dave, what exactly were you thinking?” territory.
But that's part of the fun of digging back through the catalogue. You get to hear the experiments, the happy accidents, the questionable decisions — and the places where I was figuring things out.
So here it is.
Enjoy.
Lyrics
Come Up for Air
by David Husted
Hands in the wheat fields swaying
Dwell in the shades amongst the drowning
Come up for air
My mind tires and wanders
Twilight breeze driving through freeways
Come up for air
I’ve been underground 1,000 years
I bathed this heart in 1,000 tears
This empty silence where fires burn low
I catch a spark between my fingers
And in my mind’s eye, I reach for the sky
I think it’s time to remember
May I rise up from the very low lows
The fruit is ripe
I think I might
