Q: what were the origins of "where I've been"?
A: during an idea generating session on apr 11, 2019, i came up with the chord figure and melody for the verse. during a songwork session on apr 20, 2021, i got the lyrics to the first stanza. in late august 2022, i was searching through the list to find the next song to select for song/video production (due sept 13), and "where i've been" seemed to be a highly favored choice at that time, but i instead decided to actually use no selection, and just start writing a video (to possibly lead into a song, or maybe not) without any song selection. But i guess "where i've been" was still at the forefront of my mind, so i ended up launching into it within the first few seconds of the dialogue. It was actually my goal to really write something that combined song and non-song in a more 50/50 balanced way, but then there's also generally a desire to make the song playable as a song on its own, outside the video. As i continued writing, i actually broke out of the song and back into more dialogue after the first stanza. And that was pretty fun and cool, but i knew that wouldn't work for the song-only version. So then i found myself in a position where i was writing 2 different versions of this whole thing, in parallel: one version which breaks in and out of song, and another version that stays in the song once the song starts. And pretty quickly i realized that that would be way too confusing. So i just kept it in song without breaking it. So my goal of really mixing the song and non-song 50/50 turned out to be a failure, this time around. and the "where i've been" song ended up taking over, with no return to diaglogue, for the rest of the video. Also, the goodbyes section has a completely alternately written version, which still ends with the last line as is (where i was / wasn't). I ended up completely rewriting that section because the first version felt like it had too strong a similarity to the 'bring me down / pick me up' section of ground plane