I wrote and recorded this song in my parents' basement on the first night of my recent vacation back to my hometown of Haines, Alaska. Despite traveling literally all day to get there, and with two young children to boot, I was full of energy and wide awake the first night of our stay. After everyone else fell asleep I took a long walk in the late Alaskan twilight down on the beach that I used to play on as a child. When I got back to my parents' house I picked up my old guitar (my first guitar, which now lives in my parents' basement) and wrote this tune.

I helped dig that basement by hand, with pick and shovel, filling up 5 gallon buckets of dirt to send up a make-shift conveyor belt to my dad's old dump truck. Of course my parents finished the basement the year that I left for college, so I never really reaped the fruits of my labor.

Now, the basement is jam packed full of the collections of objects needed to be a fix-it guy who can fix anything. That is my dad. He can fix almost any kind of mechanical or electrical device you can think of, and he has probably saved all the parts needed and knows just where they are in the chaos. The basement is also where all of my old stuff and the accumulated stuff of my siblings ended up. Old school folders, coin and rock collections, toys, baseball cards... all crammed into shelves and stacked in alcoves and teetering in piles.

I plan on writing an entire post about the basement, it is full of very strange and wondrous things and is a delightfully strange window into the mind of my father. I picked up a magnifying glass that was lying around and took some interesting video clips through it which I used in this music video.

All music, pictures and video by moi

Much love - Carl

Dig Down - lyrics

I want to dig down, down to the bedrock
I want to dig down, down to the bottom
I want to take shovels and picks to the rocks and the dirt
I want to fill buckets and buckets and truckloads of earth

I want to go down, down to the basement
I want to go back, back where it started
I need to remind my brain - because these cells aren't the same
I want to drink straight from the tap of the unfiltered batch

I want to do gown, down to the water
I want to do down, down to the beach
Sometimes it's just out of reach
It's on the tip of the tongue
It's a sound in the dark
and the memories spark

I want to slow down, and savor this moment
I wand to slow down, pause and rewind it
But the hours must pass, neither slower nor fast
and regrets of the future must echo in the past
But the hours must pass, neither slower nor fast
and regrets of the future must echo in the past