More Life Tonight

This song is special to me, and I wanted to roll out the red carpet for it. I asked my friend Justin Muffett to mix it, and I love what he did with it. Like most of the songs on this album, Josh Kaplan and I recorded the first take together. We sat in his basement, with me on acoustic guitar and vocals while he played drums. The rest of the song was built around Josh’s drum performance—classic Josh Kaplan, full of personality, expression, tension, release, drama, and dynamic.

I loved working with keyboardist John Guari to match Josh’s energy on this track. Structurally, "More Life Tonight" was inspired by Joni Mitchell’s "Chinese Cafe/Unchained Melody," a song where she interpolates "Unchained Melody" to create a sense of place. I decided to write my own version of a romantic pop ballad that might have been heard on the radio in a bygone era—a time when the zeitgeist more likely converged around "standard" pop songs everyone knew: "Oh my sweetheart, oh my darling/I long for your embrace..."

Writing lyrics has become more and more like dream logic for me over time, and this one is no different. I thought back to field trips I took as a kid in England to learn about the Blitz—families and neighbors huddling together underground to avoid attacks from above. I thought about Minneapolis in 2020, when armored vehicles rumbled down the street below my two-story walkup while people went about business as usual, carrying full plastic baskets to the coin-op laundromats. I thought about my students, some of whom had left refugee camps only to encounter scenes that must have felt familiar to them. I thought about what it means to be a neighbor and how we’re carved up by geographical, racial, religious, ethnic, and economic barriers established long before we were born. And I thought about the millions of stories of the people living within a square mile of me.

Mother reached back inside
For the light
It was snowing like the TV
Or the radio in the kitchen on Christmas Day

Buildings closed all around
The bodega
Salt is on the sidewalk
And my dinner plate made of paper just blew away

A voice from the avenue
Says there’s more life tonight

Thunder shakes from your chest to your teeth
See the armored cars parading
Busy laundromat, light is tumbling out from the thin, thin glass
They say Saturday night’s alright
Unless you’re lonely or you’re hiding
Charge your telephone, sing a song with your neighbors under your breath

A voice from the avenue
Says there’s more life tonight

”Oh my sweetheart, oh my darling
I long for your embrace
You are my light in the darkness
My heart will not obey In the verses, hear the forces
Amassing on the square
I’ll build a bridge to cross the river
I’d meet you anywhere”

Electricity’s on for a while
Raid the icebox for a sandwich
Question everything, but just give me a moment to think
Babies born everyday in Shimelba, their mothers and their fathers
Singing lullabies, singing songs that they learned when they were young

A voice from the telephone
Says it might end tonight

”Oh my sweetheart, oh my darling I long for your embrace
You are my light in the darkness
My heart will not obey In the verses, hear the forces
Amassing in the streets In the chorus, singing for us
My neighborhood repeats
Oh my sweetheart, oh my darling
They call us a disgrace
Under cover of the darkness
Our troubles are erased In the verses, hear the forces
Amassing on the square
I’ll build a bridge to cross the river I’d meet you anywhere”