"Tell Me How It Ends" was my third release, and the song where everything changed.

The idea came from my bookshelf. Sitting on it was a collection of essays I was supposed to read for my second-year seminar, called Tell Me How It Ends. I liked how the phrase sounded, and I was feeling bittersweet about my imminent high school graduation — so when I started writing, the song just poured out.

Once it was relatively fleshed out, I knew I wanted to produce it. I went to Morris, and we finished arranging and writing the song together before starting production. We have at least seven or eight drafts, each one with him trying something new, or me. It was a big experiment — we were still finding our unique sounds — and I took an extra week of production just to add vocal stacks to every verse.

"Tell Me How It Ends" is where I fell in love with production. Morris still handled the technical side, making sure we weren't messing the song up irreparably, but this was the first time I realized a song could sound exactly like it did in my head. It had been two years since we released "Butterflies" and "T-Shirt," and we'd grown a lot — with plenty to prove, both to ourselves and to the people listening.

That growth changed how we worked. "Tell Me How It Ends" has more live instruments, more interesting effects, and more tracks altogether. I came up with a simple picking pattern for the verses, Morris took the lead on the bridge, and throughout, we oscillated between comfort and tension.

All this to say: I am very proud of "Tell Me How It Ends," and I hope you like it.