Interview: Carson McHone on Still Life

This is the second email interview I've done with a beloved artist and while I haven't yet figured out much about how I can do this sort of thing better, I've learned a bit about what I shouldn't be doing at all. For instance: writing questions that turn out to be longer than the answers. Seeing an artist annotate a devoted admirer's overreaching thesis can be interesting, I suppose. But it's bad form — it's not the point of an interview — and I apologize. In my defense, Carson and two of her Outfit bandmates did publish a great piece called Julianna Riolino, Carson McHone, and Daniel Romano Want You to Tell Them What Their Songs Mean. And so I did, last summer, and Carson was gracious, and responded.

Some context for the second-to-last question: for months and months, as I fell deeper and deeper in love with Still Life, I was convinced that several of the songs had been written about Daniel Romano, the man that Carson married at some point after writing all these songs but before recording them. As it turns out, I was reading too much into things. I am an idealist and a diehard monogamist, and I guess I couldn't help but assume that a love as fierce and beautiful as is sung of in the title track, or Folk Song, or Tried, would lead, in the end, to marriage. Though marriage itself is, of course, not an ending, so much as where things really begin. 

One other bit of context: I'm a liberal arts teacher at a university in China and included most of the Still Life album, as well as the two Camera Varda Variations, in the syllabus of a songwriting class last autumn. And three of the four Still Life videos are part of a music video class I've taught twice over. The students love Carson. 

So here is our interview, or rather "Still Life: the Thesis, by Sigismund Sludig — as Annotated, Thoughtfully and Patiently, by Carson McHone."

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Sigismund Ashlay Sludig: What is your relationship with albums you have finished? Do you listen to them after the final mixes are done?

Carson McHone: Still Life was the first record that I was more immediately proud of and could listen back to as a record and enjoy. The others took more time to be able to revisit.

Sigismund: Has your relationship with the songs on Still Life changed after touring them?

Carson: Yes definitely. You begin to have a relationship to the performance and less so to the initial feeling that brought about the song — also with different band personnel you think more about the instrumentation, and some have taken on different shapes or leaned this way or that — I’ve become more playful and less precious about them I think — I hope.  

Hawks Don’t Share

Sigismund: I love how this starts, the two electric guitars storming into the left and right channel ahead of anything else. Are you and Daniel playing one electric each, as you’ve done live? Or was that two Daniels? Or two Carsons? Do you remember the moment it became clear that the song needs to start this way?

Carson: The two guitar parts on the record are both Daniel, and when we do it live we split them up between the two of us. The back and forth between those parts is in line with the push and pull, thematically, of the lyrics — so it felt immediately right to have those parts playing off each other.  

Sigismund: How did Hawks Don’t Share end up being chosen to open the album? Were there other contenders?

Carson: It’s one of the oldest songs, it was a staple in any live set I did and kicked the album into gear and sort of set the stage as a bit of an emotional battleground, while also being where my last album left off in a way, just chronologically. 

Sigismund: Was that terrifically vivid image of the couple in the car, frozen mid-argument, the impetus for the rest of the song?

Carson: Yes, that verse was written years prior actually and forgotten about, then I picked it up again after reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and finished the song. 

Sigismund: Lines that thrilled the students in my songwriting class: “I’ve got a soft spot for your madness, and your fierce embrace, and the quiet violence in your face.” I love when a break-up song has space both for bitterness (as in the first verse) and clear-headed regret (“how cruel it is that we mistrust”) on the one hand, and on the other, words like the ones just quoted, of still-sincere awe at that unknowable, still-desired one now lost.

Carson: Thank you.

Sigismund: The video moves me to tears almost every time I watch it. In another interview, you spoke about the poignance and power of the contrast between the relationship depicted in the song lyrics and the community celebrated in the video. Could you tell me more about how the video, and your idea for it, took shape? There are no cuts; was it done in a single take?

Carson: I love this video, I’m glad you like it! No cuts, all one take, first try. Hawks was actually the last video we made for the album, all the rest were made sort of in and out of quarantine, just Daniel and myself, like the record. But since finishing the album, and spending time in my new home and playing and working alongside this new group of creatives, I wanted to showcase this newfound camaraderie, and luckily the crew were on board, which I am very grateful for! I also love it when a music video narrative sort of exists parallel to the song — so they can both exist as their own separate pieces of art.  

 

Still Life 

Sigismund: The electric guitar solo at the end sounds absolutely spontaneous, it’s like the sudden roar of an engine — but clearly whoever is playing it learned it well enough to double-track it, so precision and forethought are in there too. You’ve said that the song underwent a long journey from the way you wrote it on guitar to its final album arrangement. I imagine the guitar solo being the explosion that decided once and for all that this was the arrangement that the song needed. Am I being fanciful?

Carson: The demo I made for this song does the opposite at the end — it completely breaks down, whereas the record version takes off. It could have gone either way really, and it did, but this is the version that made the most sense to share, and it’s one that carries energy we can harness night after night on stage. The initial version was powerful, but devastating, this one is my favorite, and the energy carries on.

Sigismund: In an interview that I can’t locate anymore, you spoke of how the lyrics to some of the songs on Still Life have an aggression that is new to your work. It’s all over Folk Song (though subtly, carefully held back) and here too: “Everybody gets tired. They can’t just stick around.” But then there’s this complicated balance with the sheer, beautiful, open vulnerability of the chorus, and also with the partly self-directed rage of lines like “it just don’t seem right I am stuck here, inside a still life.” The swirl of emotions and decisions in this song is breathtaking. What did it feel like, writing these lyrics?

Carson: Still Life was one that just fell out, whereas other songs are sometimes constructed, labored over to get them just so, this one came out all at once, as is — the only thing that changed was the delivery — that solo at the end. 

 

Fingernail Moon

Sigismund: The lull of Fingernail Moon after the blast of the title track: was it always clear that these two would appear in sequence? I can imagine Fingernail Moon being a great closer too, lush and poignant as it is.

Carson: Fingernail Moon actually used to be a song I’d start my live sets with, so it was a contender to open the album for a while, and I’m a bit of a slave to chronology, but then once you go through the process of recording, and the album itself takes on its own new life, songs fall into different places for different reasons — but I think that’s why it ended up closer to the top, because for me it was older than some of the others. 

Sigismund: When I lived in the United States, I drove around a lot. I never made it as far south as Austin, but I drove through the Panhandle, and Oklahoma, and many times through the prairies of Colorado. I can picture that sliver of a moon in a summer sky above the prairie just as well as I can imagine it above the snowed-over towns of upstate New York, over near Welland. Either way, Fingernail Moon puts me in mind of the distance between earth and sky, of night and its mystery. Do you ever set out writing a song just wanting to convey a particular scene, a particular place, more than an emotion or story per se?

Carson: Absolutely. I’ve never thought of myself as a great story teller, I usually set out to distill a feeling or a scene. 

Sigismund: Still Life, the album, has a heavy heart. But the person who speaks through its songs is fundamentally, despite all the pain and uncertainty, undaunted. Here, the speaker recognizes herself in the moon whose glow is all but gone; but she is also aware of the vibrancy that exists, but which just now happens to be hidden, in herself and in that celestial companion. “It’s dark but it’s true.” Actually, it’s kind of like those lines from the second verse in Hawks Don’t Share, about the quiet violence. The speaker can see both things at once (in Hawks, the end of the love and the strength of the love; in Fingernail Moon, the diminished light and the waiting fullness). 

Carson: Yes, there’s still hope, you’re still speaking, or singing, or thinking. 

Sigismund: Has this proven a favorite with people who’ve gotten back to you about the album? It’s garnered several appreciative comments on YouTube, and my students, for whom this song wasn’t assigned listening, went and found it for themselves, telling me the following week, “Carson’s Fingernail Moon is so good!!”

Carson: Ah, that’s nice to hear, yes, I haven’t done it that much live since the record came out, but I have a few times, and folks remember it and respond to it, which is really nice.  

 

Someone Else

Sigismund: One of my favorite things about the album as a whole is your vocal phrasing. The melodies you sing are beautiful, distinct, catchy; and when I sing the songs to myself, or in my head, I know how the melodies go. But if I try to sing along with the actual recordings, I’m constantly wrong. There is such surprise and meaning and majesty in the ways you bring syllables to the fore or hold off, waiting, waiting... the choruses might have the same melodies and words but thanks to the phrasing, they’re always different. Someone Else is one of the songs where this vocal approach is most prominent. Is it a technique you had to hone, or something that evolved and blossomed, slowly but naturally, over time?

Carson: That song in particular had to sound natural - because of the nature of the lyrics — I wanted to write something very straightforward, no hidden meaning, just blatant, not trying to be anything other than what it was — it was a fine line to not come across as lazy — I think I pulled it off — it feels that way when I play and sing it, so I’d say it was very intentional, but organic, or honest at least. 

Sigismund: The pauses in the delivery are biting. “And now you need me ........ and now you don’t.” And, later, “you won’t let it go too far, because there are boundaries ............................ sometimes.” Vicious. (But, again, the accusations are balanced and complicated by the pure joy of the third verse, about the photograph.) How do you figure out where to incorporate these pauses? When you write the lyrics, do you know the pauses will happen where they do?

Carson: I’d say usually, but sometimes the pauses shift or change, as do the words and their delivery.

 

Spoil on the Vine

Sigismund: Spoil on the Vine has one of my favorite arrangements on the album. So eerie. What stages did the song pass through before arriving here?

Carson: A few different ones, drastic at first, then I found my stride when I decided to approach the intro differently and break it down to sort of just a bass line, and then it found where it wanted to sit and the changes were just in form.

Sigismund: I love how, the second time you sing “Won’t you cry into my ears,” the words “so that I can hear your tears” are replaced by a jagged, heart-piercing, three-second guitar solo. That’s exactly the sound of those tears, isn’t it? 

Carson: Definitely. That was a decision we made while recording — to leave that line out, because the guitar speaks them. 

Sigismund: There is a couplet I want to ask about: “Youth it was our cave. Now no mystery remains.” Do you mean that the so-called mischief which the speaker and her playmate got themselves into (perhaps not expecting the depth of feeling that the misbehavior, as they call it, would lead to) marks the end of youth, the end of innocence? As in, it has illuminated the treacherous emotional place that had been in shadow up until then, and which now is revealed to be full of pain, the “privileged pain” of love? (That’s my best attempt so far at understanding those lines, but it doesn’t satisfy.)

Carson: I would say it has more to do with the corruption of innocence — what society and systems sort of beat out of youth — perhaps in trying to protect that very innocence the wrong things are being emphasized and prioritized and the mystery and creativity and playfulness and experimentation, and variation is being scared out of us.  

Sigismund: This song has an amazing video too, as dramatic, captivating, and subtle as its song. Did you grow up in that house and backyard?

Cason: I didn’t grow up there, but it’s the neighbors' backyard where my mother (who helped us film the video) now lives, out in far west Texas. 

Sigismund: The Noh-esque battle between your character and the one Daniel plays at first puts me in mind of the notion in Hawks Don’t Share that “we’re both boxers, babe, we don’t make love.”

Carson: Yes, lots of self sabotage and jealous love themes… I love that you thought of “Noh” — what a wonderful ritual/performance that I didn’t know about before, thanks for turning me on to this. 

Sigismund: This is not a question, I just want you to know that when I taught Still Life in class, Spoil on the Vine was a particular favorite. One student mentioned that she would play the assigned songs in her dorm room (of six people) and that all her roommates loved Spoil on the Vine too.

Carson: I love that song too. Thanks. 

 

Sweet Magnolia

Sigismund: Sweet Magnolia is the song that needed the longest to settle into my heart. In choosing such a slow and rich arrangement, did you figure that it would be a less immediate sort of thing?

Carson: It’s always been a song that could only be delivered slowly and starkly, at least as far as the vocals were concerned — I used to play it live a lot, with a full band, but I waited to record it because it never felt right.

Sigismund: Did Daniel helm the writing of the midi string part, or did you do it together?

Carson: I wanted everything but vocals and strings to drop out for the second verse and I wanted the strings to carry this dissonant tension — and Daniel wrote the beautiful string arrangement you hear on the record. 

Sigismund: When you were working on the sequencing, were you doing it for vinyl? I mean, were you intentionally picking Sweet Magnolia to open Side B?

Carson: Yes. I didn’t know when we recorded it where it would end up, but once it was finished and we moved on to sequence it, we chose it to open Side B.

Sigismund: Talking with Americana UK, you mentioned that this is one of the (not too numerous) songs you have written about someone else. You said that with songs about others, “I try and keep myself out of it as much as I can.” The line “If you ain’t bitter yet, well! Give it time” is irresistible, but much else about the song I can only guess at. Would you be willing to elucidate the context of the lyrics a little?

Carson: I tried to write from both sides of my parents’ divorce, but ultimately I couldn’t keep myself out of it.

Sigismund: Any connection here to Jason Molina, that great bard of the flower in the title? I got into his music a few months ago, and (as with all great musical discoveries, including you) it blew my mind and heart wide open. Has he crossed your musical horizons? I know Steven Lambke loves him; his comments about Molina online were what got me listening.

Carson: I don’t know Jason Molina’s songs, no. 

 

Only Lovers

Sigismund: What a wonderful horn arrangement. How did it come together?

Carson: Daniel came up with the horn parts. His bandmate, at the time, David Nardi, played a few lines that Daniel then sampled and built a part out of. 

Sigismund: And the handclaps?

Carson: Gotta love em. This is partly a joke but partly so serious — if I’ve learned anything from Daniel it is that it’s never a bad move to throw shaker and claps on a song, and in fact, sometimes that just makes it!

Sigismund: There’s a moment that surprises and delights me every time I hear it: 2:19, when the vocals and the drums jump back in, in perfect unison. It wouldn’t hurt the magic of the moment to know that it was achieved through careful editing, but I like to tell myself that you and Daniel actually nailed that moment live. But it seems impossible?

Carson: We recorded pretty much all of this in our living room, so minimal room to work with and lots of bleed when recording, so pretty much every song started off as a scratch track of my vocal and guitar and then anything else was added instrument by instrument — it was only the two of us, so we couldn’t do it all at once. We nail it live all the time though — so — it’s still magical. 

Sigismund: The irony and bitterness of the chorus is beautifully offset by the arrangement, by Daniel’s “sha la las,” which make the song sound straightforwardly head-over-heels, as if pulled from an early ‘60s Beach Boys album. How did you two hit upon this contrast?

Carson: The nature of the title really. We decided to lean into the playfulness of the drum part and approach it as the sort of laughing through the tears thing more than something that was deep and brooding. 

 

End of the World

Sigismund: The acoustic guitar arrangement: you in the left channel and Daniel in the right? The other way around? Did one person double-track both guitars?

Carson: It’s both of us — not sure which side, definitely mine is less complicated, ha! but we’re both playing. 

Sigismund: Great vocal arrangement, too, with your voice sometimes single-tracked in the center, and sometimes double-tracked, panned hard left and hard right. How did you decide which lines should be delivered by one voice, and which by two?

Carson: Line by line, it was very intentional. 

Sigismund: The midi bagpipes are fantastic.

Carson: No midi bagpipes, maybe what you’re hearing is the violin? We found my old violin while staying at my mom’s house and Daniel played it. 

Sigismund: I love that we get to hear Julianna Riolino harmonize with you in the Camera Varda Variation. How have her vocals colored your songs live?

Carson: It’s so lovely to sing with other people, it’s still quite new to me and it’s a thrill. 

Sigismund: You’ve said elsewhere that this was a song written on tour — in Sweden, I think? — rather than at home, where most of the other songs found life. Is your writing process basically continuous, or is there a difference between songs you write at home and songs you write while on tour?

Carson: No idea — maybe there is — I haven’t pulled off writing on the road much — writing in general tends to be a bit of a struggle for me, but when I finally finish something that feels good that I’ve labored over, it’s the most rewarding thing in the world, it feels like I’ve untied some knot in myself, like I’m understanding myself little by little.  

Sigismund: Despite the stateliness of both arrangements, Still Life and Camera Varda — this is another of the songs where the aggression breaks through, isn’t it? There is invitation (first verse), there is wary wistfulness (first chorus), there is quiet horror, or at least dismay (second verse), there is self-accusation (second chorus) — but it all culminates, right before and again after the instrumental break, in accusations: “I know you won’t think twice ... tell me, what do you know of restraint?” — words sung with pointed restraint themselves.

Carson: Yes, exactly.

 

Trim the Rose

Sigismund: Another of my favorite arrangements. That starkly emphasized and orchestrated four-note riff, in contrast with the gentle and sparse body of the song, is stunning. (The same student that turned her roommates onto Spoil on the Vine made the four-note riff in Trim the Rose her ringtone.) 

Carson: Wow, cool! 

Sigismund: Are Trim the Rose and Hawks Don’t Share companion pieces? They seem to be about someone with similar shortfalls: incommunicative, overbearing, sarcastic or joking when that’s not what is called for. That callous “grinning face” of Hawks Don’t Share seems to hover over or behind the dialogue here too.

Carson: No — but similar themes I guess.

Sigismund: The ending is chilling. The instruments play one final chorus, but no more words str sung, since there is no longer any rose to trim, with the whole garden decimated.

Carson: Exactly.

Folk Song

Sigismund: This shares a melody with Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies, but the words, the delivery, and the arrangement make the song entirely your own: the folk process, in real time! I’m curious as to the order of things. Did the words come first? And then one day, as you walked around humming that old melody to yourself, you realized these words you’d written would fit right into its embrace? Or did the decision to make your own song out of the Fair and Tender Ladies melody come first, so that the words were written specifically to the tune?

Carson: Honestly I can’t remember — but I do know it all come together very quickly, similar to the songs Still Life and Tried, so I think it was likely I was humming the melody and then out all the words came — and they don’t rhyme either — at least, there’s not a very strict scheme. 

Sigismund: The Richard Thompsonesque guitar solos are my favorite musical moments on the whole album. Did you play them, or did Daniel? And how are they SO perfect for the song?!

Carson: Me too. Daniel magic. Not a lot was communicated verbally between the two of us when recording this album, a lot of it really felt unbelievably perfect. 

Sigismund: I love the line “No one can hear, now, this song I sing.” It draws attention to the deeply personal origin of songs. As I write, in the early summer of 2023, Folk Song is out in the world, and anyone who wishes to can hear it, but its origin was in solitude and quiet, in pain and need. Before it was released — before it was recorded — before anybody else heard it — the writer heard it. What does a song mean to you while you are still writing it? And what does it mean when you have finished it, but not yet played it to anyone else?

Carson: It’s special for sure, to have this “new” thing to yourself, very exciting, but it’s got to be shared, it’s got to be communicated. 

Sigismund: At what point do you consider a song finished?

Carson: No idea. I have tended to collect and edit, but then sometimes things just arrive finished and you don’t question them, each one is different. 

 

Tried

Sigismund: Still Life has an incredible ending, with Tried tiptoeing into Folk Song’s grand shadow, quietly saying its piece, and — that’s it, that’s the end. It feels to me like Folk Song and Tried, appearing together at the end of the album, are a breakthrough, but a double-edged breakthrough. If you’ll bear with me... In Folk Song, the speaker makes the decision to leave some mark on the man she loves, “this time around.” Her tone as she sings this, the precision of her statement, the force with which she says it (“please understand...”) — even if she’s only saying it to herself, for now, nevertheless: a decision has been made, and all will be different from now on. The phantoms that haunt songs like Still Life and Spoil on the Vine are dispelled, and the fingernail moon begins to expand again. But, along with the decision — or, in the aftermath of what that decision will lead to — comes a new set of phantoms, those which Tried wrestles with (“I am no thief!... but it’s not what you thought, you can’t wash it off”). Because that voice from far off calling, that Someone Else, also exists, and it will now be her turn to feel pain. So in Folk Song we witness the grandeur, the greatness of the moment in which things finally turn clear, the lover coming into her inheritance; and in Tried, gently, but insistently, follow some of the consequences. Were you thinking along these lines as you worked out the sequencing? Or am I way off, in which case, what did lead you to put these two songs last?

Carson: Yes, definitely, they are sister songs in their story I guess.  

Sigismund: Tried might have been a great opener as well, the last lines (“and when you write it / say that I tried”) being followed by an album’s worth of exactly that: the document of the trying: the background story and careful analysis of a growing, and increasingly powerful, increasingly irresistible (for all that resistance may seem the wiser) love...

Carson: I often start live sets with Tried.

Sigismund: The album version of Tried may technically be the more vulnerable, in the sense that it’s just you and your guitar, nothing else. But the frightened, psychedelic, black-as-night Camera Varda arrangement seems truer to the song’s ruminations and unresolved guilt. What led you and Daniel to reimagine it so thoroughly?

Carson: I had done Tried live with my band back in Austin and I had this idea in my head of syncopated drums and a heavier sound. I really like that song and think it’s good and I wanted to sing some different parts and extend some things. And Daniel obliged, so we pulled the tape machine out, haha. That song really spurred the whole Camera Varda Variation EP — then I wanted to involve the group because Daniel and I made the record before I played live with The Outfit, so then for the End of the World we asked the band to join us, so that was nice. 

Sigismund: I’d like to ask about some albums that didn’t come out under your name. What are your thoughts, and/or what do you remember about the making of...

Cobra Poems? You play a memorable part in the Nocturne Child video; plus, several songs are now live Outfit staples.

Carson: That was the first Outfit record I sang on, and we recorded it in Camera Varda, the studio we all built together, so that’ll always be a special one. 

Sigismund: Kissing the Foe? You sing harmony on here somewhere. 

Carson: Yes, we did a lot of that record out in West Texas while staying with my mom. But Walking Around Holding Hands we recorded at my old house in Austin actually, and we pieced those lyrics together from some funny stories from our past — then I think maybe we sped the tape up to give it that high effect. 

Sigismund: Volcano Volcano, by Steven Lambke? Such a fantastic record, with your voice prominent.

Carson: I love this record. Daniel and I did harmonies on this album from afar and a little later in the process, but I vividly remember watching and listening to the initial tracking with Daniel on drums and Steve on guitar — it was so beautiful to hear these songs for the first time as they were being recorded — and played by a band for the first time while tracking essentially. 

Sigismund: La Luna!

Carson: This one is wild and beautiful, from its initial birth on a little parlor guitar (a Sigma I used to play when I first started performing) we had hanging around at my mom’s place in the desert where we were staying, to its final fully fleshed version for the album. And then the film we made too! Maybe someday that’ll see the light of day. 

Sigismund: All Blue, by Julianna Riolino? You don’t play on the album, but you’ve been in the band as Jules has promoted it live.

Carson: It’s been fun to perform as a part of someone else’s band — with Daniel, and with Julianna — it’s something I’d never done before and that’s been a really lovely challenge and exercise for me! 

Sigismund: Colder Streams, by The Sadies? Another that the Outfit has been breathing life into onstage.

Carson: The Sadies are so wonderful — it’s really an honor to play with them, I especially love that song we do with them, So Far for So Few.

Sigismund: And two final questions, one looking back, one looking forward.

I wanted this interview to focus on the art of the album rather than on anything overtly personal, but I’ve decided that I have to ask... piecing together details here and there — not out of some sleuthing instinct but because of how the songs sing to each other, so that eventually I couldn’t help but notice and wonder — you and Daniel had a difficult 2020, spent mostly apart. The songs you’ve written about each other amount (already) to a body of love songs as gorgeous and disarming as those that John wrote about Yoko, and Yoko about John. And, like the songs Paul wrote for Linda (with Linda singing harmony), they embody the awe, the mystery, and the profound, soul-shaping comfort that true love brings in its wake. If I may ask — what was it like for you to hear Dandelion back in the spring of 2020? And White Flag, come autumn?

Carson: All of the songs for still life were written prior to 2020 and prior to Daniel and I being involved, so nothing I’ve written since our relationship has been recorded yet, although we’ve been playing some of them live. When Daniel and I finally got together I showed him the songs of Still Life — maybe a strange way to enter into a romantic relationship — but then again maybe not at all — the recording process was amazing, because it was our first time working together, as artists, and also as romantic partners, so in that way, all of these songs of my own “struggle”, we interpreted together as we recorded them, and there was lots of growing in the process I believe. So out of the darkness of those tunes came this joy of recording them with a true partner. Cathartic and educational! I love Dandelion and White Flag, both because I feel very close to them, because we were falling in love, but also because they’re full of beautiful songs and are excellently performed and recorded. 

Sigismund: The songs on Still Life are at least four years old now. Talking with Vish Khanna in 2021, you mentioned that you and Daniel were at work on new Carson songs, some of which I think you have since showcased live. Is the follow-up album to Still Life done, just as-yet-unreleased? Have you written still more new songs since? And what are you willing to reveal about your new material to those like me who have yet to hear a single note or word?

Carson: We leave next week to make the next record, I can’t wait to hear what happens — and to share it! I won't say more — don't want to spoil the magic.