Welcome to a page all about “Footsteps in the Sand”
Click on the arrow to activate the exfm player: Footsteps in the Sand
Read below for lyrics and credits
The players:
VC: lead & harmony vocals, Moserite acoustic guitar, Turner Renaissance Guitar, Fender Precision bass, Yamaha CS1 synth (piano), drum programming; Mike Grow: Fender lap steel guitar
The Story:
Another song started on my last stay in my family’s place in Malibu. I, like so many others, spent the weeks immediately after a messy breakup playing the whole relationship over and over again in my head. My trip to Malibu echoed one almost exactly a year earlier that I had spent with my ex and fairly literally chronicled in the lyrics to this song. When I began recording this in late 2010 shortly after I had completed it, I was still in a fog. However that time did produce the lead vocal performance which so captures the emotional tone I was trying for. Yet as I listened to it (and the lead vocals for “Gone” which I had recorded around the same time) I was puzzled by the strange, echo-y, distant sound they had. It wasn’t for weeks that I discovered that I had placed my vocal mike backwards in it’s clip. Aha! I redid the vocals for “Gone” but I knew I could never recapture this take…and I decided I liked the sound and then just kept it. Then the final cherry on top came when Mike added his haunting lap steel part which just put this song into a whole new realm. I realized this sort of dreary, sad, spacey music isn’t for everyone…but if you like that sort of thing…or perhaps you’ve had a messy breakup (who hasn’t)….I really think you’ll love this song.
Footsteps in the Sand
Same flight, same time
Same ride, clear October night
Same walk down the rocky beach
I reach out my hand, no one’s in reach
Walking alone, headphones on
Haunted by familiar songs
Sun sets slowly over the pier
But only one shadow is cast here
Tracing your footsteps in the sand
One long year stretched between
Unbridled joy and this sad scene
Up and down, a rollercoaster ride,
Our love washed away with the tide
Dining alone at our old places
Fighting to fill the empty spaces
Flashing back to our laughter in the pool
Now floating alone like some pathetic fool
Tracing your footsteps in the sand
The future’s there for me to change
But I keep looking back
At all the coarse details of our “estrange”
And the union I just couldn’t hack
It seems your love to need and my need to love
Could not find a way to mesh
So I walk this beach searching high above
For a way to start again fresh
Same flight, same time
Same ride home, cold October night
Memories of that rocky beach
I reach out my hand, no one’s in reach…
Tracing your footsteps in the sand
VC: 10/30 & 11/23/10