Last night was a record-breaker for tornados. Possibly the longest single tornado touchdown in US history (a 240 mile streak, if it’s confirmed) and only the third EF-4 tornado on record. It flattened Mayfield, Kentucky and smashed up a relatively new Amazon warehouse not far from here. It threw debris 30,000 feet into the air, in the way of any commercial flights that were otherwise busy trying not to be near any giant tornadoes. An old photograph from Dawson Springs, Kentucky flew 125 miles to New Albany, Indiana (and is still intact; it’ll be returned to the family that it belongs to).
Here in our home in a St. Louis suburb, we had a “tornado confirmed on the ground” warning that got extended. Less than an hour another warning (“rotation confirmed” right over our town) sent us back into the basement. But thankfully, not a single branch down; even the flimsy shed roof is in no worse shape that it had been.
Completely coincidentally, as my spouse started watching the 1970 Scrooge with Albert Finney, I was recording a replacement for a song I’d titled “Apparition.” I promise it is not about Ghosts of Christmas (Era).
Overall, I feel like the album also coincidentally — though vaguely, at most — fits Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, which I’m halfway through reading now. Again, not really an intended connection — but I am using it as inspiration to rename one of the silly temporary names I had chosen for a track.
Anyway, the new “Apparition” is a radical remix of the original, with a few bits of the old material anchored by a lot of new. The overall shape and tone of it is very different, an appropriately ghostly beginning.
This is the most I’ve reworked my music so close to release — I thought I was going to spend the weekend mastering the album and publish on Monday night, but I made the decision to change it last night between tornadoes.