Lost Songs: Only Holding On

Not even a bridesmaid

It’s nuts, honestly, considering my current pace of work, to look back on the years of 2004-2011. I’ve never been busier in my life during those seven years — and I doubt I’ll ever be so busy again. I had a rapaciousness for work, then, and things were moving so quickly that I felt like I had to sprint to keep up with everything. That pace, of course, took its toll, and I’m thankful to have the space and time to make work that I have now. All this to say: I’m surprised, looking back at old calendars, at how quickly we moved from touring The Crane Wife, to recording new material for a record in March of ‘08, to a solo tour of mine in April of ‘08, straight into the making of The Hazards of Love in August of the same year. I also got married that summer. And moved house. And spent three weeks in France. WTF.

By the early spring of 2008, I had collected a handful of songs, songs that I felt like were destined to be a new Decemberists record, the inevitable follow up to The Crane Wife. Then I got stuck on this idea of making a record of songs all tied around a story drawn from folk song tropes, and all those nice little pop songs and ballads got kicked to the curb.

Those songs, instead, found their way on to a series of singles we made and released in the fall of 2008: Always A Bridesmaid. There was one song, however, that never even made the cut as a bridesmaid: “Only Holding On.” We learned it and recorded it, but I was never quite satisfied with the outcome. It might’ve been that I was never quite satisfied with the song itself; I feel like the band comported itself very well on the studio version. Here’s “Only Holding On” in all its also-ran glory, recorded at home as a demo for the band, with me trying to hide its flaws under a blanket of noisy guitars. As you do.