Sandur
EO – I’d just returned from a weeklong trip to Iceland when I wrote this. It’d been a full week of nothing but nonstop, grandiose beauty and awe-inspiration.
On the flight home, I’d fallen asleep watching a (what else) Sigur Ros documentary on the plane. When I woke up, I had the seeds for this song stuck in my head. The following day, despite a long bus ride back from the airport and grueling 3 hours waiting in a line at US Customs and Immigration, the next morning I got up, went into the studio, and recorded nearly all of “Sandur” in one long session, improvising vocal lines and string parts, which I then just repeatedly overdubbed.
(A Sandur is a glacial outwash plain, a large expanse of flat gravel and sand that extends from the foot of a glacier. The photo of the stone cairn on the cover of “Otherwise Engaged” was taken in the middle of the Skeidarasandur, near the Skaftafell glacier. In a way this is a sideways title track)