The song began a week or so before the challenge. Unfortunately, I can’t remember or find the quote that inspired the tune in the first place, but I heard a line that basically said that in spite of our many advancements in scientific understanding and technology, when it comes to the vastness and mystery of the universe, humans are still living in the cave, and everything else is just thunder and lightning outside. I think of the thunder and lightning as the true scale and nature of existence, consciousness, life, death and the cosmos.
I heard this at a time when I was heavy in thought and writing around topics of the supernatural. Much of the more rational and personal take on this I put into the song Don’t Waste Daylight, but after that quote, I began this spooky little song.
I only wrote one verse and a repeating line for the hook at that time, and it wasn’t until Week Five that I revisited the idea to develop it. When I first started writing it, I was inspired by the quote to explore the mystery and terror of the unknown, but once I revisited the idea, I was pulled in a different direction. The original working title was simply “Haunted Fixed”. I didn’t yet see the shadows in the cave.
If you look back through the previous weeks of the challenge, everything I had written for the most part had been rooted in my life experience, whether it was events of my childhood or sights and sounds from my day-to-day. While putting this song together, I wanted to challenge myself to take a different approach and a different perspective by leaning into more fantastical and mythological imagery. What started as a meditation on the weight of the unknowable turned into a total fantasy.
Along with that, I was inspired by the approach friends of mine took in a song they were working on, where the lyrics were not explicitly telling the story that they had in their heads, merely suggesting it. It made me think that my lyrics don’t need to be super specific all the time. They can be more abstract, more vague.
Now allow me to demystify the lyrics and expose the images behind the song.
I really put a lot of thought and time into images and establishing a whole mythology in my head to reference as I wrote the lyrics. The earliest image was of dancers around a big fire. The first line was originally written as a plea for comfort through the storm outside. I reinterpreted it as the narrator dancing in close contact with a partner in an intense, life-affirming ritual by a great fire.
These weren’t prehistoric cave people, tribal people, or even human beings, for that matter. They were characters who lived entirely in an enclosed environment, where outside was an expanse of space, clouds, thunder and lightning, something similar to the dream I described in Timeless Expanse. These characters could feel rumblings in the walls but could not experience what was outside directly, except through the great fire.
This was not a campfire, but instead an eternal flame, fed from some unseen place the way lava flows from somewhere deep within the earth, and this flame was a bridge to the land beyond. Early on, I envisioned a sort of funeral rite being performed, with the remains of one of these characters being offered up to the fire. The dancers had no contact with that land, but they could see visions of spirits dancing in the flames: the spirits of those who had left the cave and passed through the flame into this mysterious place.
As I wrote further, I came to see the fire itself as able to alter the perception of these dancers, and by their close proximity, bring them into a state where they began to see and hear things outside of the confines of the cave. With this in mind, I moved away from any focus on funeral rites and instead imagined them as having individual and shared psychedelic experiences around the fire.
If the fire were a direct window into that great beyond, it would be so magnificent, so spectacular and powerful, so immense, that they couldn’t fully perceive what they were looking at. It’s like a fish looking at a great work of art.
During the week I was working on this song, I went to an event where people were discussing mushrooms. The topic moved from mycelium to medicinal mushrooms, and then to psychedelics. The speaker noted the difference between psychedelic mushrooms and Amanita muscaria, the famous fly agaric, which when prepared properly and ingested acts as a deliriant. They described the difference between deliriants and hallucinogens: with hallucinogens, one is often aware that they’re hallucinating and retains some rational thought, while in a state of delirium, the hallucinations are indistinguishable from reality.
This concept quickly influenced the direction of the song. As I returned to writing it at the end of the week, I figured that by the end of the tune, the characters are still dancing around the fire as they were from the very start, except now they’ve lost a sense of their place in the cave, of the fire, of their bodies, and they find themselves in a new state. They’ve become the spirits in the fire. They’ve become the thunder and lightning itself.
“Shadows In The Cave”
Hold me close, there’s thunder and lightning just outside
Ghosts beyond, join us dancing in the fire
Flame unbound casts our shadow in the cave
Shadows in the cave
We’re haunted, fixed
Barely hanging onto our lives
We’re haunted, fixed
Taken from the cave by the light
We’re haunted
What’s that sound? We felt a shock in the cave
The rumble leaves us frightened and amazed
We offer up our bodies to the flame
For a visit to the land of thunder and lightning
Haunted, fixed
Tremble and sweat by the fire
We’re haunted, fixed
Stripped from the cave by the light-
-ning and thunder
Spark and rumble in the sky
We stomp our feet
Kicking up clouds outside
We are shadows, we are shadows
We are shadows, we are shadows
Holding close
There’s thunder and lightning all around
We are ghosts, we keep dancing in the fire
Now unbound, smoke and bones in the cave
In the cave
We’re haunted