Track By Track: Tennis on Yours Conditionally

In The Morning I'll Be Better

I don’t know why songs take me so long to finish. I am not a song-a-day person. This one took almost a year for no reason, really. I had written this gospel-like chord progression but everything I tried to do with it sounded predictable so I threw it out. Patrick found it months later buried in a folder of forgotten demos and immediately wrote this frantic, way over-the-top drum beat. That solved the song for both of us. Lyrics were the final obstacle. I didn’t finish them until four months later while we were sailing. Patrick was coping with the serious illness of a loved one, and I found myself trying to comfort him. The impulse worked its way into the song: "I’ll write your cares away that I might spare you pain… I’ll hide you from the world until we’re forgotten". Faced with losing a loved one, while we ourselves were at risk on the ocean, made us strangely somber yet optimistic. We felt the precariousness of our lives and said to it: in the morning I’ll be better.

My Emotions Are Blinding

I had these lyrics written in a notebook for years: "Women are much closer to nature / so can't you understand / binary opposition hits my like a divine plan..."

I wanted to write about the way women are often reduced to their bodies, planted squarely in the material world. The male/female dichotomy is extremely telling in the way we conceive gender and identity. I don't know why I thought there could be a song in that... but the whole idea stuck with me until the song's completion.

Fields Of Blue

This is the only song taken directly from my ship's log. Patrick wrote all of the music, and I pulled lines I had used to describe a passage for the lyrics.

Ladies Don't Play Guitar

I’d been pushing myself to present a stronger point of view lyrically and to make more assertions about the way I feel constricted or shaped by gender, like an invisible hand that guides the way I work and carry myself, especially within the music industry. This song was my starting point. I took a very intentional break from songwriting until I felt like I had something to say again. This song was my way back in.

Matrimony

A thorough and factual account of our wedding day. I wrote it as an anniversary gift for Patrick. I didn't think it would end up on the record because it was so personal, but somehow it worked.

Baby Don't Believe

This is the last song we wrote for the record. We didn't even record it in the same session. We tracked the whole thing at home in a strange and lucid moment of inspiration. It's our favorite sounding song on the record.

Please Don't Ruin This For Me

Patrick wrote these brilliant guitar melodies and I was desperate to make a song out of it. It wasn't until we were sailing that the lyrics and melody came to me. This song is about my tenuous grasp on my own happiness and sense of self. If I have to continually assert myself over and against the world or risk losing what I have so carefully built.

10 Minutes 10 Years

The only lyrics Patrick wrote for me: "You could have me for 10 minutes / you could have me for 10 years". I thought it was intensely romantic and the rest of the song came to us in an easy torrent.

Modern Woman

Women tend to define themselves in terms of their relationship to the world and others, or at least I do. With this song I specifically consider my relationships with other women in an homage to a friendship I lost. I wrote the whole song one afternoon in my bedroom. I wish they all came so easily.

Island Music

Patrick wrote the music, built a loop out of it, and I sang over it until this melody came to me. The lyrics "Why can't I cry?" already lived in my notebook. It speaks to the numbness I frequently experience on tour. Highs and lows, beauty and loss - all whisk by me in an indistinct haze.