The world begins
with newborn skin
we are right now
You're a needle girl
in a haystack world
we are right now
You breathe it in
the highs and lows
we call it living
In this needle and haystack life
I've found miracle's there in your eyes
It's no accident we're here tonight
we are once in a lifetime
No, don't let go
don't give up hope
all is forgiven
You breathe it in
the highs and lows
we call it living
All is not lost
all is not lost
become who you are
it happens once in a lifetime
Behind the Song:
About the album...
"The storms of this life shatter our plans. They tear through our world and destroy our hopes and dreams. They ruin sunny days, flatten the structures we depend on, and shock our world views. Hello Hurricane is an attempt to sing into the storm. Hello Hurricane is a declaration: you can't silence my love. My plans will fail, the storms of this life will come, and chaos will disrupt even my best intentions, but my love will not be destroyed. Beneath the sound and the fury there is a deeper order still- deeper than life itself. An order that cannot be shaken by the storms of this life. There is a love stronger than the chaos, running underneath us- beckoning us to go below the skin-deep externals, beyond the wind, even into the eye of the storm. Hello Hurricane, you're not enough- you can't silence my love.
I've seen storms in my life. I've even seen them pass through on stage. I've witnessed chaos and dissonance overtake a song. But after the rain, some of these unsettling musical experiences become my favorite moments: the ones that can't be planned, rehearsed, or repeated. I've had a few of these unexpected elations up in a tiny LA club called Hotel Cafe playing cover tunes with a few of my friends/musical heroes. The organizer of the evenings was none other than friend/hero Tom Morello, the Night Watchman himself who would invite his friends (Slash, Ben Harper, Serj Tankian, Perry Farrell, etc.) to join him in the musical festivities. The nights would usually end with a memorable grand finale of cover songs with everyone onstage playing songs that were only partly rehearsed. Most the time the results were spectacular- other times we would have to stop the evening to figure out logistics like who was going to play what and determine what key we were going to be playing in. It was during one of these pauses that Tom said a quote about music that I'll never forget. He said music is like sausage. "Sometimes you want to enjoy it without knowing the details of what goes into it."
There may be some who want this type of experience: to enjoy the music of Hello Hurricane without knowing the back-story. Maybe the blood, sweat, and tears make you a little squeamish. I completely understand this sentiment. There were stormy, (though necessary) moments during the recording process that were neither graceful nor pretty. This was not an easy record to make; we were fighting to get somewhere we had never been. Looking back at the ground we covered I'm certain that every moment (even the more difficult ones) were meaningful to the final push. But it certainly was a push... so if you want the shiny new music detached from the labor pains, turn back now! For everyone else, here are a few of the stories behind each song. I'm so honored to have been a part of this record- to share these experiences with Tim, Chad, Drew, Jerome and everyone else who helped in the struggle for excellence. In many ways, these songs are like children to me and I'm honored to be able to introduce you to them first-hand." - Jon Foreman (Switchfoot)
About "Needle and Haystack Life"
""There are only 2 ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle" - Einstein
Here's a song that epitomizes the way that we recorded this record, pushing at every stage to reach a higher ground. There are several iterations of this song, each of them with a radically different approach- a method we never had the time for until we built our own studio. One of the reasons we built our own studio was to enable productive experimentation like this without paying for it by the hour. We first tracked this tune with a long time friend named Shane Wilson (we did our very first SF record with Shane). Then we revisited this song again with another friend of ours, Darryl Thorpe (Radiohead, Paul McCartney). For both of these versions the song was cut at half time (rather than the frenetic double-time pace that's on the record). Upon reviewing the list of songs with Mike Elizondo, "Needle" felt too similar in tempo and feel to "Yet" (a tune on the final list for the record). So it was scrapped from the list of tunes for the record. Because we recorded more than 80 songs for this record, we had a lot of songs to push to the side. Mike's objective input on determining which songs not to work on was invaluable. I had learned to really trust his instincts and agreed whole-heartedly with most the final list that he had suggested. He was right that "Needle" and "Yet" on the same record made the record much sleepier. However, "Needle" kept coming back to Tim and I as an important track.
So we put it aside for a week or two to see if it would return (the best ones always come back around). I kept coming back to the content of the lyric. All of the concepts behind the song - hope against the backdrop of chaos and meaninglessness, recognizing the value of every human life -these felt so existentially motivating. "Needle" felt like a song that I wanted to sing every night. And I felt like it could be done with an element of the horizon built into the song. So, onstage in Vegas we worked up the song in sound-check, recorded the idea into a cell phone, and came back with a fresh direction for the tune.
Drew came up with an ingenious idea for a unique guitar tone. We played the electric guitar through an amp, miked the amp with an acoustic guitar (in open tuning of the key of the song), plugged the acoustic guitar into another amp and recorded the signal from that second amp. The result was so expansive and dramatic I felt like it should start the record. So that's what you hear at the top: a sweet amalgamation of electric and acoustic madness.
This song makes me think of abundant, overflowing life. The math involved for life to be possible at all is staggering. Let alone beauty. love. joy. forgiveness. To hold someone in your arms is to hold a living, breathing miracle. At any age, this life is a gift." - Jon Foreman (Switchfoot)
