It's relatively rare for me to write a song about a specific person. Most of the time, when I'm singing about a woman, she's more of an idea than an actual individual. A convenient placeholder for whatever emotion or experience I'm trying to express. Nobody in particular, and occasionally several people rolled into one.

But every once in a while, someone refuses to remain hypothetical. And when that happens, I don't necessarily tell them.

There are good reasons for this.

Take “Through the Looking Glass,” for example. That song was inspired by someone I knew in high school, and let's just say it isn't an especially flattering portrait. I never saw much value in announcing to the world, or to her, exactly how negatively I viewed her. Especially since she was in the audience a couple of times when we performed it live.

Awkward? Potentially.

But I digress.

“When the Tide Goes Out” belongs to that small category of songs inspired by an actual person. I wrote it in 1987, during the slow collapse of a relationship I wasn't particularly willing to admit was ending. I was still trying to think my way out of something my heart already understood. I kept imagining ways we might hold things together, searching for some solution that would somehow reverse what was happening.

There wasn't one.

We were drifting apart, and neither of us could stop it. What I remember particularly well is how the song began. I was sitting at the piano, turning all of this over in my head, while my mother was watching television in another room. A couple of piano chords drifted in from whatever she was watching, and something about their mood caught my attention. I started playing around with a progression that captured a similar feeling. And there it was. The doorway into the song.

From that modest beginning, the composition gradually wandered into some rather ambitious musical territory. I remember playing it on the piano for my friend Tom Schumacher, who remarked that it sounded like something Pink Floyd would write if they were all sober.

I'm still not entirely certain whether that was supposed to be a compliment. I suspect not. But there was no denying the influence. A Floydian Slip, perhaps.

In fact, I spent considerable time trying to make the song sound less like Pink Floyd. I simplified passages, stripped away layers, and experimented with arrangements that were more conventional and less atmospheric. None of them worked. The song stubbornly insisted on being exactly what it wanted to be. Eventually, I stopped arguing.

I've learned over the years that when a composition develops a particularly strong musical identity, fighting against it is usually a waste of time. You can refine it, polish it, and occasionally persuade it to behave a little better. But you can't always make it become something else.

This one wanted space, atmosphere, and long, slowly developing emotional passages. So that's what it got.

And then came the recording.

At roughly eight minutes, “When the Tide Goes Out” is one of the longest and most elaborate compositions on Track Zero. The arrangement includes multiple string parts, four layers of guitars, piano, organ, drums, percussion, French horn, trumpet, tubular bells, and even a triangle.

Yes, a triangle. Sometimes a fellow just needs a little shimmer.

Individually, most of the instrumental parts are relatively simple. The difficulty comes from getting them to coexist without turning the entire arrangement into an eight-minute traffic accident. Add thirteen vocal tracks for the overlapping passages at the end, and things become considerably more interesting.

Mot will refer to that section as a canon, although if we want to be gloriously pretentious about it, it's actually an exercise in polyphonic ostinato counterpoint which sounds considerably more impressive…and has the added benefit of making people stop asking questions.

But the real challenge wasn't the number of instruments or the complexity of the arrangement. It was the microscopic details.

Consider what happens when an orchestra plays a chord. Even when twenty-four musicians are performing together, they don't strike their notes at precisely the same instant. One player might enter a few milliseconds ahead of another. Someone else's attack might be slightly slower. The resulting sound is unified, but it isn't mechanically perfect. And that's part of what makes it sound natural.

When you're constructing an orchestral arrangement electronically, however, it's remarkably easy to have every instrument attack at exactly the same moment. The result can sound artificial, harsh, or simply overwhelming. So I spent an extraordinary amount of time adjusting the timing of individual notes, sometimes by only a few milliseconds, to create the natural variation that would occur in a live performance.

Then there was the other end of every note.

With this many instruments, you can't simply let everything sustain indefinitely. Notes begin overlapping, harmonies become muddy, and the clarity of the arrangement disappears. So I found myself trimming releases, adjusting sustain lengths, and making sure each phrase had room to breathe.

A piano note might need to end just before a string passage entered. A brass tone might need to linger slightly longer. A guitar hammer-on might require an almost imperceptible adjustment to keep it from colliding with something else. Most listeners will never consciously notice those decisions, but they'll hear the difference. There's one moment in particular that illustrates just how obsessive the process became.

At the end of the introduction, immediately before the first verse, there's a powerful tubular-bell accent that brings nearly the entire arrangement together on a single beat.

One beat.

It took me approximately ninety minutes to get that beat right.

Ninety minutes of adjusting attacks, releases, timing, and instrumental balance so that the moment would sound like a controlled musical explosion rather than someone dropping an orchestra down a flight of stairs.

I wish I were exaggerating. But when I finally got it right, the result was exactly what I'd been hearing in my head. And that's the peculiar satisfaction of recording music this way. You can spend an unreasonable amount of time on something that lasts less than a second, knowing full well that nobody listening will ever realize how much work went into it.

They'll simply hear the music. Which, of course, is the point. But underneath all that orchestration and technical fussiness is a fairly straightforward emotional story.

The title is a metaphor for the moment when a relationship begins to recede. At high tide, the water covers everything. The shoreline is beautiful, the surface seems endless, and whatever lies beneath remains hidden. But tides don't stay high forever.

Eventually, the water withdraws. And when it does, everything that was concealed begins to emerge. The rocks. The debris. The uneven shoreline. The things that were always there, even when you couldn't see them.

That's what the song is about. Not anger. Not betrayal. Not even necessarily regret. It's about the painful clarity that arrives when you finally recognize that something you desperately wanted to preserve has already begun slipping away.

You can argue with the tide all you want but it isn't particularly interested in your opinion.

As for the woman who inspired it, I'll leave her identity to speculation. I'm reasonably certain that anyone who knew me in 1987 could figure it out. We remained in touch, but I never told her I'd written the song. Not because I was deliberately concealing anything. The opportunity simply never presented itself.

As I prepared to release Track Zero, I briefly considered reaching out and mentioning it. Then I imagined the conversation.

“Hi! Remember me? By the way, I wrote an eight-minute breakup song about you in 1987.”

Somehow, I couldn't envision that going particularly well. So I decided against it.

Nearly forty years have passed since I sat at that piano, listening to a few stray chords drifting in from another room and trying to make sense of a relationship that was coming apart. The relationship ended. The song didn't.

And perhaps that's enough. Some songs are letters that never get mailed. This one can remain in the envelope.