“Tell Me How It Ends” is my most recent release. Recent is a strong word, considering it has been out for 2 years. I came up with the idea for the song by looking at my bookshelf. There was a collection of essays on the shelf that I was supposed to read for my second-year seminar class. The essays were called “Tell Me How It Ends.” I liked how the phrase sounded, and I felt bittersweet about my imminent high school graduation, so when I started writing, the song just came out.

Once the song was relatively fleshed out, I realized that it was a song I wanted to produce. So, I went to Morris, and we finished arranging and writing the song together before beginning production. We have at least 7 or 8 drafts of the song where he was trying something new, or I was. It was a big experiment, and we were in the process of finding our unique sounds while producing this song. I took an extra week of production to add vocal stacks on every verse.

“Tell Me How It Ends” was where I fell in love with production. While Morris was still doing the technical production and ensuring we weren’t messing the song up irreparably, I realized that “Tell Me How It Ends” could sound exactly like it did in my head. This was two years after Morris and I had released “Butterflies” and “T-Shirt,” and we had learned much since then. We had lots to prove to ourselves and those who listened to our music.

The process for producing “Tell Me How It Ends” was slightly different from our previous projects because we had become stronger musicians over the two years we weren’t producing. “Tell Me How It Ends” has more live instruments, interesting effects, and more tracks altogether. I came up with a very standard picking pattern for the verses, and Morris took the lead on the bridge. We oscillated between conveying comfort and tension in our production of the song. 

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