The House The Fire Show Unbuilt

Compositionally, musically our songs are, for the most part, built around a central theme. What’s compelling about our arrangements is that, by and large, after we build the structure, we reduce or remove that central theme. What remains is the suggestion of the center with various attracting or distracting decorations.

It’s as if we’ve built a very sturdy 2-story house…not a very ornate house, plain yet eminently serviceable; livable. Then we build a scaffold around that house which echoes the shape and form and size and structure.

That scaffold is the rhythm section–the bass and the drums. It echoes the central theme. Like a mirror it allows you to perceive the original object without actually seeing it.

Then we tear the house down. The scaffold "remembers" what the house looked like and continues to exist as if the house is still there. The guitars string banners to the scaffold, slashing across the structure, disrupting the flow or suggesting a feature from the original house; the central theme.

Passersby feel the suggestion of the house in the scaffold. But if the scaffold is altered, if a side is bowed out; an angle widened or narrowed, the impression of the house, its identity, its feel is inexorably altered. If the scaffold is further rearranged, if levels are removed or added, if the prima facie design is undermined or disfigured chaos ensues. Eventually, we lose, not only the recognizable shape of our house, but the sense of any house at all–any structure, any form; any song. In short, if the scaffold fails, the center will not hold.