Story Behind The Song

I had in my mind this idea that relationships were like a vast sea upon which the continents move, and could not get it out of my head. This formed a lot of impetus for Drift. Carried within was also a sorrow over the loss of an animal we had named `NightEyes` (after a character in a Robin Hobb book). I was quite tramatized by his death and the first line of the song was in my head when I thought about NightEyes. It seems a weird and superfluous start to a song fundamentally about a relationship, but I find when writing that thoughts and images are often juxtapositioned on top of each other, often in ways that are not apparently linked, but somehow have made a connection within my mind.

Song Description

There is a moment in some relationships when you realize that you are so far apart, a slow drift, as imperceptible as the continents moving until the moment when you are oceans apart. And you wonder; how did we get here? Wanting to breach the gap, to find some common ground, you feel the other on the edges of you, the spaces once inhabited empty as the endless sea. Drift is about the small movements we make within relationships that either move us together or apart.

Lyrics

Your night eyes are so sad my love
Their dark pools my abyss
I heard the dying cry my love
Within the continental drift

Oh our continents have drifted
So far on the molten tides of time
Oh how I wonder when our shores will meet again

Once we were Pangea love, a solid entity
But the wild beauty cultivates
From shifting boundaries

Oh our continents have drifted
And the ground is not stable like it was
Oh I am lost in the shifting faults of love

Though the sea expands between us, shifting constantly
At the edge of my world is carried
Still the shape of we

Oh our continents have drifted
All these techtonic plates within our hearts leaves us divided
We are now worlds apart

Your night eyes are so sad my love
Their dark pools my abyss
I heard the dying cry my love
Within the continental drift