You and Me on the Rock (featuring Lucius) – the single: June 30, 2022
Brandi Carlile released the single and an official animated video for this track off her album In These Silent Days (released October 1 2021). It features the band Lucius on backing vocals (read more about their involvement further down below).
The video credits include:
Directed by Drew Tyndell
Animated by Computer Team
Style director – Maryam Malakpour
Hair – Pamela Neal
Make up – Loren Canby
Creative Director – Catherine Carlile & Jade Ehlers
Commissioner – Mandee Mallonee
In The Canyon Haze alternative version
There was also an alternative version of the song produced for the delux In The Canyon Haze edition of the album featuring her wife Catherine Carlile in duet. This version had been song only a couple of times in solo shows during the 2022 tour, and then for the first time during the IMAX live concert in late September 2022, followed by a national tv performance on Trevor Noah’s The Daily Show on 19 October 2022.
There is also a rare first version of the demo written on a dulcimer, that can be heard in part in the Podcast “Song Exploder, where Brandi Carlile breaks down the track.
Unlike the first single (Right On Time) – there wasn’t a separate artwork (thumbnail or image) done for the single. On streaming platforms it uses the album artwork.
On Brandi Carlile’s Instagram account she said
“This song is for my wife, Catherine. When life changed during quarantine and everything that I identify myself by went away, I was left with a question of ‘is what I’ve built my life on really a solid foundation?’
“I wrote this song and realized that even the most intensely self-identifying things can go away, but what my life is built on, which is faith and my family, it’s a rock, and it’s solid.”
The Song Exploder – YOU AND ME ON THE ROCK
On February 9 2022, In the Podcast “Song Exploder“, Brandi Carlile breaks down the song, and shares the story of during the pandemic how she was ‘shut in’ and “can’t abide a total pause on my life… so I built a garden out of stack stones…. The lyrics came to me one day out in the garden as I was working with these rocks, with these stones, I remembered the Sunday School song we use to sing in church when I was a little kid “Build Your House On A Rock” …
She continues “I realised, that whatever the world can throw at me, even if it challenged my very identity, which is what it had done with taking away my ability to play music in front of people, that I had managed to build my house on a rock, and I wrote the lyrics to that song in my mind about my wife and kids.”
In the Stereogum interview Brandi gave after the release of the album, she said about the line
In reference to the Joni Mitchell influence, she said there was something “sunshiney” about the song – and it remindered her of Joni Mitchell. This is at a time especially when she had just immersered herself in performing the Blue concert and the ‘Joni Jams’. She said “thats the kind of thing that will change your songwriting,” and she knew she couldn’t be derivitive and gave herself permission to “dive down the Joni rabbit hole one time in her life”.
She discussed the song with her collaborators Tim & Phil Hanseroth who she says “helped me build that garden” and asked them to write it on the dulcimer.
Brandi discusses that until Tim brought the dulcimer out they had no sense of melody or rythmn until he started playing it and the “lyrics started to appear”.
The demo (which you can hear on the podcast) – was never intended to be heard by anyone but she did send it to her producer Dave Cobb, who said “too joni”.
In the studio, they swapped the dulcimer for acoustic guitar, and Brandi explains, “Tim played guitar, Dave Cobb played lead guitar, some kind of picking thing, and gave it a bit more country lilt, and it started to get grounded in some of the Americana music that makes me really feel like who I am” and then Phil brings in bass. And then Chris Powell on drums. On this she explains “it’s an incredibly busy drum part, but he was playing so light, like with pencils“.
For the lyric – “We built wooden houses on Frozen Ponds” Brand reminisces about her childhood bustop opposite a pond that would freeze over seasonally, and years later drove past it and saw that a family had built a house in the dry season, and she said “They don’t know that it’s going to flood, I knew, but they didn’t know”.
Shooter Jennings plays the piano in the song. Brandi says of the piano on the track “The song is very fluttery, it has the ability to fly up into the air, and their needs to be some weight. That piano makes what I’m saying sound important.” She also loves that because they all record in the same small studio room, you can hear her vocal and all the guitars in the piano mics.
While Brandi was ‘controlling’ something in the uncontrollable time of the pandemic, by being in her garden, he wife Catherine would go out on walks on their property. It occured to Brandi – “that was all the distance I needed from her” – and thus the lyric – in the chorus “Me out in my garden, and you out on your walk, is all the distance this old girl can take without listening to you talk”
In the Stereogum interview Brandi gave after the release of the album, she said about that same line, “She’s got the most beautiful English accent that I just could listen to even when she’s bitching at me. I could listen to it all day. And I just realized that they’re my foundation and that anything can change, and that won’t.”
For Brandi she felt there was something really feminine about the song and didn’t want guys on it, – she wanted women. The connection between women. Brandi recorded the harmonies herself at first, (which you can hear in the podcast). The Band Lucius who sang in Brandi Carlile’s Blue band provided perfect background vocals. Lucious was sent the song and the wrote the Background vocal for it.
In the Sterogum interview she shared “I produced the [new] Lucius album, which, holy… You’ve got to hear this thing. If you haven’t heard it yet, it’s just ridiculous. I got to sing with the girls on tons of the songs, and just the way our voices sounded together, I had already finished the record, and I recalled the mix because I wanted them to sing it. They sent back the harmonies, and I was doing backflips. I cranked them up loud.”
Brandi shares that she took the unmixed song to Joni Mitchell who after hearing it says “sounds like a hit”.
In the in-depth interview from Chris Willman of Variety on December 16 2022, Brandi discussed it being nominated for a Grammy in 2023, and refering to her “pop” category of Right On Time the year prior she said
“it’s like the community that we build around us, where we cast our lot, where we invest our time and our art, needs to be kind of where we say we are, absolutely. I think pop’s different, because I suppose that like to at least half the people involved in those decisions, “pop” just means popular. And what do I know? When the album came out, Joni Mitchell said “You and Me on the Rock” sounded like a hit. And Harry Styles texted me and said it was his favorite song … Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. Maybe that is indeed pop. To Joni, it would be popular. To Harry, it would be fuckin’ pop, you know? But I guess I want to be tried by a jury of my peers. I want the people in my community to let me know from their perspective whether or not I’m trying hard enough… I think it’s about where you cast your lot in life, and there are certain decisions that you make around who produces your album and what kinds of instruments you play and how you record it that maybe a person listening in a room [deciding] whether or not you fit into a genre wouldn’t necessarily get.“
Chris Willman then discuss the remix of the song with Catherine,
“…But you did a remix version where you sing it with your wife, Catherine, and even without hearing that, most people out there probably understand and accept that it is about your marriage. This comes at a time where understanding and acceptance are not necessarily the norm in what’s happening in American life.
No, and it’s cool of you to notice that and point that out. Because it’s not that LGBTQIA people should have to be overexerting ourselves to come across as more wholesome than anybody else. But when the culture wants to overtly sexualize and demonize queer people by calling us groomers, and making out that we just live these lives of total sex-focused promiscuity, which couldn’t be further from the truth, a song like “You and Me on the Rock” is important, if you recognize it as an anthem of queer domesticity. It’s about building your house on a foundation that you can be happy in. It’s about the right to not be alone for all of your life. And to those that would kind of dismantle that dream and that inalienable human right, I think that song is a protest song, just in its sweetness.“
And then just musically, thinking about which artists that have been a part of Grammy history to which we could compare “You and Me on the Rock.” You’ve said it was overtly Joni-influenced. As much as that, I keep thinking of something fast and strummy like Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.“
Totally! It used to sound so Joni-derived, because we wrote it on a dulcimer. Because we were having a hard time breaking out of our usual rhythms writing our up-tempos, they sounded like us, so we were like, let’s really just embrace the Joni thing on one song. Let’s get this dulcimer out and just try something. And Timmy came up with the [riff], and it just gave me this good, grateful, warm and fuzzy feeling, and I just started writing a love song. And we completely didn’t shy away from the Joni-isms at all. I remember sending the demo to (producers) Dave Cobb and Shooter Jennings that day. Shooter was like, “I love it. It’s perfect.” And Dave goes, “Whoa! Way too Joni.” [Laughs.] And so they pulled me over the center line in the triangle that gets created between the three of us, and we met in the middle of “I love it. It’s perfect” and “Way too Joni,” and we took the dulcimer out and played it with acoustic guitar. And that is why you work with producers, even when you are one.
READ THE WHOLE INTERVIEW HERE.
You and Me on The Rock
They build wooden houses on frozen ponds
In the summertime when the water’s gone
Diagonal lines in their rolled-out lawns
And the sage always smells so pretty
But nobody cares where the birds have gone
When the rain comes down on Babylon
The stonemason’s phone rings all day long
And you gotta get back to the city
I build my house up on this rock, baby
Every day with you
There’s nothin’ in that town I need
After everything we’ve been through
Me out in my garden and you out on your walk
Is all the distance this poor girl can take
Without listenin’ to you talk
I don’t need their money, baby
Just you and me on the rock
You and me on the rock
I built paper planes when I learned to fly
Like a 747 fallin’ out of the sky
I folded ’em crooked and now I’m wonderin’ why
I could always end up in the water
But nobody’s askin’ why she lookin’ so thin
Why she’s laughin’ too hard, why she drinkin’ again
A falling star, she’s a paper plane
And she was goin’ down when you caught her
I build my house up on this rock, baby
Every day with you
There’s nothin’ in that town I need
After everything we’ve been through
Me out in my garden and you out on your walk
Is all the distance this poor girl can take
Without listenin’ to you talk
I don’t need their money, baby
Just you and me on the rock
It’s an earthquake, it’s a hard wind
It’s a record-breakin’ tide and it is rollin’ in
It’s a big sea, but it can’t touch you and me
It’s just a water view
And what a view
I don’t need their money, baby
Woo
I build my house up on this rock, baby
Every day with you
There’s nothin’ in that town I need
After everything we’ve been through
Me out in my garden and you out on your walk
Is all the distance this old girl can take
Without listenin’ to you talk
I don’t need their money, baby
Just you and me on the rock
I don’t need their money, baby (I don’t need their money, baby)
It’s you and me on the rock (it’s you and me on the rock)
You and me on the rock
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Brandi M. Carlile / Phillip John Hanseroth / Timothy Jay Hanseroth
You and Me on the Rock lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group
