A brief explanation of how we approached recording a cover of “Numb” by the Danish band Vaylon: we hear the line “As I

A brief explanation of how we approached recording a cover of “Numb” by the Danish band Vaylon: we hear the line “As I walk along the shore” to be the key, because the songwriter is in a timeless moment as he reflects upon his past, his regrets, his addictions, his disgraces. His mind, as he walks, is outside of time — he’s in a sort of “eternity” of the soul. And that makes the shore, perhaps, like the River Styx, for the songwriter is at a threshold or liminal zone, trying to separate himself from the chains of the past. He is tied down by his habits, not really able to progress or to find a new freedom. He is so full of doubts bottled inside him that he can’t fully detach from his old life. And so we hear these lyrics as describing a state of existence described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, in which a soul finds himself in the in-between existence of “the Bardo.” Because the songwriter keeps trudging forward against the wind, we made the chorus #2 and chorus #3 more and more far-away, more and more ghostly, as if a fading signal on Tesla’s spirit radio. The songwriter ever walks along the shore and finally leaves the listener behind. The listener inevitably loses the songwriter, but the songwriter surely finds eventually himself. We created the rhythm out of clockwork sounds, to symbolize the relentlessness of time. Even in limbo, the seconds click away for the songwriter with each step he takes down the shore. 

 In the music video we created for the cover version, two paranormal investigators are trying to tune into a frequency to make contact with that distant shoreline. By the end of the song, when the singer has finally drifted into the mysterious ethers, the investigators realize that Vaylon was never there (meant to be something of a joke, in that this wasn’t Vaylon’s original recording but rather a cover version; plus, some folks will recognize it as a quotation from the David Lynch film Fire Walk With Me, when David Bowie makes a cameo appearance but doesn’t show up on the security cameras because “he was never here.”) 

 We should note that we changed only two words, “being social” to “hollow seashells” … the seashells being a hint at the shore mentioned in the chorus, as well as literally being Tibetan horns (further tying into the Tibetan Book of the Dead). Don’t miss the original track: vaylon.bandcamp.com/track/numb