To Wake You – ‘Beauty In The Smallest Things’ Track x Track
Two Wake You go track by track ‘Beauty In The Smallest Things’ EP, Out Now.
by Walter Price
San Luis Obispo, California, the home of beautiful, somber pop music? To Wake You (Karoline Hausted and Mark Davis) have a new hypnotic EP, Beauty In The Smallest Things. As comparisons are the norm these days, I’d easily say that TWY are similar to what it would sound like if Kate Bush and Martin Gore collided only to create dark sprawling love songs. Songs that linger around the corners of your soul long past their plays.
To Wake You stopped by to go Track by Track their stunning new EP ‘Beauty In The Smallest Things’-
THE PRICE OF LOVE
Standing at the threshold of the experience called falling in love are gatekeepers, those reminders about the stakes about to be undertaken: the potential for hardship, fear, and loneliness that is risked in the big game of loving and losing. It made sense to have this as the opening song, as the threshold into the album. We also like the soft and dreamy hypnotism of the track that sets the stage for what is to follow: we are in the land of wonder, of mystery, of the subconscious. The track features harpist Chris O’Connell and upright bassist Dylan Johnson.
SOMETHING FELL
Mark: All of these songs were written while Karoline was still in Denmark, while we were preparing for her to move here to California where we live now. We were having a musical dialogue, sending songs back and forth, sometimes in collaboration, sometimes as gifts to each other. This was one that I started during that time. It took on quite a transformation once we were working on live and studio versions, and that’s what is most exciting to me about the track: neither of us knew exactly where it was taking us, but we just followed – the middle section takes off on a journey where the two of us are truly dancing with each other. Karoline is playing bass on this one.
WHAT IS IT?
Karoline: The idea came at home in Denmark during the year before I migrated to the U.S.: one day I saw a hawk come flying in from the fields and it landed close to me. I felt a tremendous presence of love and sadness at the same time. I realized this deepening sense of nature was not only because of the love I was feeling but also because I was going to part with this place very soon. The recording contains a piano track from the original home demo made in Denmark.
NOT GONNA FALL
Mark: Karoline was visiting me in California. We took a trip up into the Sequoias in the snow, and pretty much stayed inside with the coziness of the lodge we were at, especially when we discovered the piano in the hall. I felt the liberty to write a melody way up in my range, thinking that Karoline would sing it- but she kept insisting that I do it. After she had returned home, we finished the song and lyrics long-distance. I think by nature of the physical distance between us, I was hyper-aware of how each moment we have together ought to be appreciated- “No one knows how long it’s going to be…”
WHERE THE DAY WENT
Karoline: At the time I lived on Møn, a small island, where I had a lot of time and landscape – space, sun and sea – and silence. It was like a beauty or a mystery that I had not noticed before was opening up to me. The songs emerged out of everything that was happening and my wish to share it with Mark, who was so far away and whom I was falling in love with. I recorded down ideas like a mad person. “I’m hiding here/ In daytime I can run through any forest/ It’s always good to be reminded…/ The pull towards/ the hidden meaning of the words ‘adore you’/ At night I climb them like a ladder.”
TO WAKE YOU
Mark: This started with the simple idea of feeling the desire to wake a lover lying next to you who is sleeping- I was thinking about whether it was possible to communicate with that sleeping person through their dreams… maybe there is some subconscious way we can communicate? Then, I had the thought that maybe all of us are “asleep” in some way, all the time- and what if there were invitations to wake up being offered all the time? “Beauty in the smallest things around us- waiting…” The song came first- then the band name.
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