The Deepest Cut, an interview

an interview with The Rabbit Room on translating grief into art

I was interviewed this spring about the song that was “the hardest to write”. I chose this one. I thought you all might enjoy the conversation, and I made up a transcript for it below.

TRANSCRIPT
(auto-generated and lightly edited cause Zach doesn’t want you to suffer)

Matt Conner from The Rabbit Room: Welcome to The Deepest Cut, a podcast about the movement from painful experiences to meaningful music. I'm your host, Matt Conner.

Here on The Deepest Cut we've asked various songwriters about the processing of their own grief or pain or sorrow into something they were willing to share with others, and the source so far has been their own experiences. But as we all know it's quite possible to feel those same things grief, pain and sorrow when feeling the burdens of others, as well the added difficulty in such moments is found in knowing what to say, if anything at all, when the impulse is to want to help to remove some of the pain to make oneself useful for the situation at hand. All too often we can end up making things worse. We've likely all felt the sting of someone who made our situation about them or maybe even offered up some unhelpful platitude in response to it all.

Singer-songwriter Zach Winters says the most difficult song from his new album Shade of Indigo is called “When It Falls Apart”, a song that took considerable time to finish because he knew he had to thread the needle carefully when figuring out what to say. It's a song that carries the grief of a friend and even offers up a response, and with that he says comes a very real responsibility to offer something substantive.

Now if you're familiar with Zach's music, you know this isn't much of a problem. Zach is a very gifted poet and wordsmith whose compositions feel like the sort of cinematic melodies in which you can really lose yourself. They're thoughtful and beautiful and this song is no exception. It's a gift offered in grace to someone mired in grief.

For this episode of The Deepest Cut, I reached out to Zach to chat with him about his newest set of songs, his new book of poetry, and the challenges of processing the grief of another responsibly. Here's our latest episode of The Deepest Cut with singer-songwriter Zach Winters…

RR: Hello and welcome to The Deepest Cut. My name is Matt Conner and I'm your host for this session. I'm just so glad to be sitting here with Zach Winters. Zach, how are you today, and care to introduce yourself? How do you know nor introduce yourself by the way? Songwriter? You're also a father of four? I'm sure you wear many hats…

ZW: I usually just say my name, and then I usually try to ask somebody about themselves…

RR: To deflect back..?

ZW: Yeah, just to um keep things normal...

RR: Well, thank you for carving out the time to be on the show here. Obviously want to talk about your music and get into really the whole gist of the podcast here. But I'd love to kind of pan the camera back if we could… before we get into “When It Falls Apart”, because this is part of a new album. Shade of Indigo came out this year, so all of this is pretty fresh. When I approached you about, “hey what's the most difficult song?” is that pretty easy for you to identify? Did you identify this because it's on the newest set of songs? How deep is that well for you of maybe difficult or painful material?

ZW: I've written a lot of songs relative to my previous self… Okay, I don't know—it's like 150 songs or something. And a lot of those came through some pain, or something akin to pain, not because I have a particularly pained life but maybe because I'm sensitive in some ways. I don't know if it's the wiring or the water, but initially I didn't really want to do the podcast cuz uh trying to figure out how to fish out a song that would feel like…

Well, there's also the thing that songwriters have to deal with—there's kind of an interior life of the song, and that's what it means to me. And then there's the way other people will meet it. I've had a few people write specifically about this song already that they've resonated along a different narrative than [where] I was writing from. And I was glad for them that it also kind of tasted like medicine in a good way… Yeah, so it was it was challenging… You know, I'm like, “Well do I pick this one from the birth of my first son that I wrote in the hospital and then couldn't finish because I was angry with God?” But I eventually did try to hash it out with God, and I did finish that song. Or you know, the one where my friend thought that their child had bone cancer, and I wrote “To The Well”.

Actually, I decided to just narrow it down to this last record just to keep myself sane, and be able to answer your question in one way.

RR: By the way… I'm glad that you said yes to this. I'm also wondering if you said yes just because my insistence to email you every, like, once a week until it made it happen. I didn't want the painful part of this podcast to be my insistence on you doing. It was just meant to be the material itself…

ZW: Yes… No, I appreciate your persistence. And sometimes I need that… especially… I like conversations, but interviews—I always feel like I don't want to listen to them again because there's something that I would have added for context or whatever… but I'm also the kind of guy that's got like… to make this conversation happen I had to close out the browser and then bring it back up, and I was like… bring back up the history, and for me you know, I have something like 70 different tabs in different windows open. That's because the nature of my brain goes in that direction… So I've just got to provide some limiters around how I will respond, or... Yes, so it's good to have this as a conversation, and whatever it does—good.

RR: Sounds good, sounds good. You said and there was the birth of my son, there was the book... I mean, has songwriting always been like a cathartic outlet for you or maybe the wrestling mat for spiritual things?

ZW: Yeah, I would say songs in themselves, music in itself, you know, the holder of the tension which creates music itself, you know… To me, it all feels like… the wavelength that I'm on in my own head and songwriting world and the art that I resonate with and the poetry and the music, tends to be in that that space of longing… that love and longing… and so a lot of what I write is in that place. I feel that maybe I could write, you know, bubblegum pop songs if I tried, but I feel the need to mean what I'm saying and what I'm writing. So yeah, my song writing does tend to be seated in that place. And a lot of that is wrestling through some spiritual things.

Some, in particular, you know, these, the few songs that I mentioned, and this one that we're going to talk about are empathic songs, which means that it didn't happen directly to me, but I was so close that I, you know, I felt some of the blast of it, you know.

And I didn't… I don't usually set out to write songs. Like, “I need to write a song for my friend that's going through this”, you know. But it just sort of happens. There's just sort of like build up of… I can tell my soul is generating a little song seed, and I realize that it needs to, you know, give birth through song somehow.

RR: By the way, is there a reason why none of the songs you brought up were things that happened to you?

ZW: The first one was—with the birth of our son. He came at 35 weeks. We spent some time in the NICU. There was some emergency stuff around that that was pretty tough. And we were told afterwards that we might not want to have any more kids because they thought this is what happened and it could be worse next time. And it turned out that couldn't have been the case. We went and saw a genetic specialist, sent our blood up to Wisconsin to have some things checked and whatever. And yeah, it wasn't that. There's definitely, I did notice when I was thinking back through my songs that there are a number of, I don't know, those deep brooding, mulling-over-pain [ones] that are empathic as well. And maybe some of the ones that apply to me feel so vulnerable, or so, in such a quiet place, that they wouldn't necessarily occur as places that I would want to have much of a conversation, so much as for that sort of devotional song to meet someone in their own quiet and pained place.

RR: Well I want to talk about “When It Falls Apart”, but Shade of Indigo—is this a newer batch of songs? Do these go back quite a ways?

ZW: Yeah, it actually came out the 24th of April, so just a week and a half ago. Yeah, real fresh.

RR: Are all the songs on it fresh to you? Or are these collected from way back?

ZW: They were all kind of from fall of 2022 to, I don't know, I guess summer of 2023. So yeah, most of them are pretty fresh.

There are some seeds of songs that are like, were kind of in my little seed pouch that I had been carrying around a little bit, but most of the writing took place in that kind of fall to spring [time frame].

RR: Love that—that word choice… Is that very much the way you view the craft by the way—song craft for you, [as] gardening?

ZW: Yeah, actually, I kind of stumbled into the metaphor. Although I feel like so many natural things have a correlative idea in the lives of us humans. I do feel like an agricultural metaphor of with songs, from their kind of seed form, to, what do you have when you've got like the nursery of plants? They're in there, they're germinating. That's when I feel like I'm getting to know them, and sitting down and figuring out what I want to plant in the garden that will eventually be a new record or something. Right now I've taken them through that maturation process. They're full grown and they're ready to bring to market. So I'm the little farmer down the road that's gonna be taking my melons out [to market].

[laughter]

RR: I'm glad you carried that analogy all the way through.

ZW: All the way. And hopefully there's some good seeds in it that are organic and they're replantable in your own garden. [with a flourish]

RR: There it is.

ZW: It's a helpful metaphor for me to know which stage I'm in, and embrace that, and not feel like I need to be seed-finding right now. Yeah, just to kind of stay in the agricultural metaphorical rhythm.

RR: This song is one that you worked on for quite some time. I read you were writing about this song and basically said this may be the first song I worked on musically for this set and the last one I finished lyrically. Is that pretty uncommon amount of wrestling for you, for a song that you actually finish and release? And can you take us behind that?

ZW: I started writing this song not knowing really what it was directed at, what it wanted to say. We were camping up in Colorado, me and my family. They had gone to sleep in the tent behind me. I was letting the embers die and playing my guitar and open tuning which I'm not that familiar with but kind of fell into this circle [progression] and melody. I initially just had kind of a phrase that I nursed a little bit and ended up throwing into the seed pouch because it was time to go to sleep.

When I revisited it, it felt like it was about a couple that had been married and gone through a divorce that I'm friends with. And I think it was challenging, partially because in some ways I was stepping into that unasked, and also wanting to give [a] proper emotional voice to some of those things I was watching unfold in a painful way. So there was something about, both empathically, kind of feeling some of those those things that were happening… It wasn't the first time I've seen friends go through that kind of pain and separation, and divorce. But it's such, it's a rough thing, and it's, I think… deeply disorienting. And so, in some ways, I wanted to [show] compassion. And I think the part that is really difficult [is] to find the words that felt both like they were empathetic, and compassionate, and not presumptive I guess. It's really challenging to know how to finish the song.

I had a different bridge to it for a while that I floated out to a couple friends. They know and love me and I trust their musical tastes… and they were like, “Man I feel that, but it doesn't quite feel right.” I've had to do this with a few songs where I was like—alright I've tried to offer a landing and it feels sort of hollow like like a friend who's going through something that all you can say is “man that sucks… I love you and I don't really have any wisdom. I don't know how to give you comfort…” And not all friends always need us to be that for them. Sometimes we just can't.

So I ended up just kind of leaning into [asking], “God what would you say to her?” That's how I was able to finish the the bridge. It didn't feel like I was using my voice anymore. I guess in some ways, I had to do this with a song from the last record, “Time of Unknowns”, where I was trying to comfort [others], and I couldn't find it in myself. And I realized I needed comfort—I needed to hear that from an outside voice. That's kind of what ended up happening with this song as well, and how I was able to finish it out.

RR: Were the bridges more hopeful that you, like you said, had another bridge… Did it feel a little bit forced in that way? Like trying to put a bow on something?

ZW: Yeah, I think I was trying to put a bow on it. But I was also attempting to use some language that I had previously left untouched. It didn't land quite for me, even though I actually think people would enjoy singing that bridge, probably more than this one, but not for the reasons that I would have hoped.

RR: What’s so striking to me about this—there are several striking things about it. One, it's just a beautiful song. It's a beautiful song. There's an honoring of the experience in this way, like inside it you're asking, you know, I'm still in the house but where is home, right? How does that feel to you trying to get inside their experience?

ZW: Yeah, it was that strange kind of dual life of being a songwriter, I'm myself and I'm also kind of like stepping into… You know sometimes when somebody gives you a word that you didn't know and you're like, "Oh my gosh, that's a perfect description for something I've experienced, or know about… I just didn't have a word for it." In some ways, I felt like that was the process I was entering into. Like you said, like honoring the experience.

I wrote a lot of verses for it because I was trying to find that right language. And because the actual, the melodic phrasing is kind of short, to both tell a story that is not trying to be, I'm not trying to create a narrative, but if you're on the inside of it emotionally, you should be able to feel something of the arc of experience.

Yeah, it was a challenge. I have not, I mean, my wife and I, when we were in college, we kind of went through this like codependency, and we broke up from being friends. And that feeling of emotional turmoil and instability… and kind of when you realize how interlinked your life was with someone else and you're trying to figure out what, the gaps to plug… in your sinking ship of self, you know? So I mean, in some ways I have some emotional reference points, and other ways I try to be a good listener for friends who are going through stuff.

RR: Yeah, it was great… It's a great song. By the way, can I ask this? Has the person who prompted this song heard the song?

ZW: I don't know. And I'm not going to ask. I'm curious, but I don't know if it's… I've thought about sending it to them, but it feels so on the nose. It's like, “Hey, you remember that time when you were like crying really hard in the bathroom? I took a picture of you. What do you think of it?”

[laughter]

So I don't know. We'll maybe someday I'll find out.

RR: That totally makes sense. And yet I'm sure there's also that tension of if it could mean something to anyone, I meant for it to mean something for you. And there's there in lies that tension there.

ZW: It's strange because I don't… I guess I'm a little bit more guided by the empathic experience rather than an objective outcome of like, when I was writing it, I didn't imagine her hearing it. And as I was finishing it or writing it, I did imagine it. And I was like, I don't know how she would feel. So it's just, it's out there though.

RR: Well, Zach, I would love to give you the chance to—is there anything else you'd like to share about the song before we have you introduce it?

ZW: Um, I got to, I recorded my stuff at home. And my friend, Jesse Proctor, who's an amazing musician and drummer, played drums on there. And another friend, Nathan Culberson, played some of the electric guitar on there. The guitar that takes you into the bridge, that's him.

I hope that whether or not people are able to resonate with the storyline that I wrote it around and the experience, that people do find some resonance with it.

RR: Well, we'd love to have you introduce a song if you're up for it.

ZW: Yeah, this song is “When It Falls Apart”. It's on my new record, Shade of Indigo. I hope you enjoy it.

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thanks for being here. I write weekly sharing poetry, songs, musings, thoughts on creative life, and hopefully some encouragement… my first collection of poetry, Snowmelt to Roots, is available in my shop, (or on Amazon). and my music is available here.

peace,

Z