Par for the Course is the first song I ever wrote!
Well, that’s not quite true. I had a few little tunes I’d written as a kid, but they were mostly joke songs or tunes my family would sing together. Sorry internet, I won’t be sharing “Banana Speedo” anytime soon.
I remember attempting to write a song early on in high school, but feeling pretty discouraged by not knowing what to write about and not knowing how to make chords sound good together. Two pretty important pieces of the puzzle, I’d say. Sadly, I got discouraged by this failed attempt and didn’t try again until I got to college. My freshman year, my friend Ethan and I tried to make a song called “Birds Aren’t Real”, but it was pretty half hearted, even though Ethan was very passionate about some of the chord choices.
Fast forward to January of 2022, my sophomore year at Middlebury. I’d just gone through some heartbreak and wasn’t really sure what to do with myself. I took out my guitar and started strumming. I liked how Phillip Phillips’ Home moved back and forth between two variations of a C chord, so I began by playing around with that. I added in some chords in between, and there, I had a verse.
“The leaves are changing, as red turns into green / They’re becoming all these colors that I’ve never seen”
The first lyrics of the song are a play on my colorblindness. It’s a running joke that I can’t see color, so I purposefully joke that leaves turn from red into green when obviously it’s the other way around. “Green” also conveniently happened to rhyme with “seen”. Boom.
The topic of leaves changing also sets up the greater theme of the song (and what later becomes a theme in some of the other songs in the EP). I do my best to make an analogy, comparing the slow but steady changing of the seasons to what I was going through mentally. I was in a rough place but I hoped that, just as winter slowly thawed, that I’d move steadily towards a more content state.
I had been listening to the song Changing of the Seasons by Two Door Cinema Club and saw the lyrics as a potential way that I could think about my own situation. I wanted to be in a place where I could say I thought less and less about my heartbreak, but that feeling was so fresh when I wrote this song that it was hard to think of anything else. I loved the lyrics of Changing of the Seasons, but the upbeat manner of the song felt jarring and mismatched. So I wanted to write my own version, with a hint of melancholy but focusing on the optimism.
“Seasons come and go, and it’s all par for the course”
You might be wondering what exactly par for the course means. After all, I’m not even a golfer. Well, it’s a way to remind myself of a mantra that I have.
I like to recognize that oftentimes, things happen to us that are out of our control. Sometimes, these things can be really good. Like, when I met my best friend on college move in day. Or, when my friend invited me to hike the Appalachian Trail during my gap semester even though I wasn’t a hiker, which totally changed my life for the better. Both of those events were completely out of my control, but they shaped my life in extremely positive ways for years to come.
But other times, these things can be terrible. When a pandemic cancels your graduation. When someone you care about passes away. These events, sadly, are also outside of your control. They just happen to you. When I was dealing with dejection surrounding negative events like these, I realized that there was a flip side to it all. While life is full of terrible moments, often out of our control, the universe also hands us beautiful gifts, equally out of our control. In the end, it might all just even out – it’s all par for the course. I like to remind myself of this fact when I’m sad for whatever reason, that there will be times of joy to come that I can’t even imagine right now, that might just fall into my lap.
Anyways, it’s a pretty important philosophy of mine, and I slipped it into this song without much explanation of what it meant. This song is overall pretty cryptic and that’s because I felt too insecure about my emotions at the time to lay it all out on the table.
“A frozen creek on an old Vermont country road / Waiting for a cargo train, graffiti on its payload”
As I wasn’t super comfortable writing explicitly about my heartbreak, I instead elected to remember some of the moments I’d shared with my partner. These small memories form the core of this song’s chorus.
A few months after the initial composition of this song, I got the idea to change the lyrics in the last chorus. I thought that it’d be nice to open up a little bit more and share more of the true meaning of the song with the listener. The line about having a new home comes from how I moved to a different dorm, and actually wrote that last chorus from my double in Gifford, even though the rest of the song was written in my single in Hadley.
Here’s a voice memo I found of me playing the first bit of this song in February of 2022. This is how the song sounded to me for most of its existence, until I got around to recording it two and a half years later in November of 2024.
I honestly wasn’t a huge fan of the song until I brought it to the studio and added some folky instruments into the mix. I thought it was alright, but I was a much bigger fan of some of the songs I’d written later. Luckily, my friend Ethan has always loved this one, and convinced me that it was good enough for the EP. So, this past fall, my producer Xander and I laid down the track, and invited my friend Aidan to come add his touch of magic to it.
Aidan and I played together in a campus band called Trail Magic. He, like me, is a multi-instrumentalist and loves to hop around between instruments. But, what I love to hear him play most is the mandolin. He’s a wiz at improvising and always knows what to add to a song to make it that much more enjoyable. We’re a great pair, because I’m much more of a rhythm musician, so to be able to watch him do his thing and rock a solo was always super satisfying. So, I just knew that I wanted him to add that sparkle to this song. I wasn’t expecting him to bring his banjo along, but when he started plunking along I knew we had something special.
The mandolin and banjo really make this song click for me. Before they were added, I wasn’t fully convinced by the tune, and felt like it needed something. I just couldn’t place what. The addition of these folky instruments gave the song exactly what it needed.
I still wanted more of a bluegrass group feel to the song. This one, I thought, could be less about me and should feel more like I was at an Avett Brothers or Lumineers concert. So Xander, my producer, added two different electric guitar tracks to this song, that filled the track out even more.
One thing about me is I’m always a fan of more instruments. I love adding sounds to each other and playing with different textures. So when I saw an old harmonica sitting on a drawer in my college house, I knew I had to add it to this song. I don’t play the harmonica at all, but my dad used to, and I’d stolen his harmonicas and brought them to college just in case I needed them. I found one chord that worked with the chorus and brought it to the next recording session, and it’s one of my favorite parts about this piece. I was super happy that even though I barely played this instrument, I had found a way to add it to my song.
A week or two after recording the track, I put a solo set together to play at a music festival that I’d organized. Xander and Aidan kindly offered to accompany me, and that’s where we performed Par for the Course for the first time.
This song has given me so much. It managed to surprise me when I brought it to the studio by growing its own folk feel and becoming a playlist-worthy song. I love folk and bluegrass and I think this song embodies those genres the most out of all the songs on my EP. And, most importantly, this song gave me the courage to continue writing, and eventually led to the five-song EP that I ended up with.
Also, because of the vagueness of the lyrics, it’s been great to see what other people have associated with this song. I’d love to hear what it means to you!
Saw You There is next! That song has one of my favorite stories of how I wrote it, so stay tuned 🙂
Listen to Par for the Course now: