Fire Builds the City

Song story & origins

Introduction

Fire Builds the City is my longest released track—about ten minutes—from The Long View (2012). The seed was a single dream line my friend Mark posted: “Rewind the film and the fire builds the city.” That phrase hit like a bell. It imagines time running backwards: destruction un-happens, and the very forces that wreck become the hands that heal. I wrapped the whole piece in Super 8 projector sounds—what I grew up with at family viewings. You hear the projector at the top and tail, and, right at the end, the loose film leader flopping as the reels spin down.

Where the song came from

Mark’s dream line suggested a whole story: if you ran a relationship backwards, would all the damage untangle into tenderness? The first verse stacks those reversals (fire building a city; a huntsman reviving a fox; a banker stealing back stolen money) and then turns personal—you put my heart back together again. After a first instrumental climb, the narrative adds home and speech: reverse the car (come back), reverse the words (let what was said in anger turn into affirmation). The third movement names addiction and regret (untake the pills; I’ll unbreak my promises) and longs to rewind today so the couple is “walking in the sunlight again.” That plea keeps cresting until only the core refrain remains: fire builds the city—repeated like a spell you say because you need it to be true.

Music and arrangement

I framed the piece as alt-rock with a friendly nod to the prog I loved in high school and college (Yes, Pink Floyd, Rush). It sits in 4/4—no fancy 7/8 this time—but it’s built like a mini-epic:

It opens quietly with banjo under the whirr of the Super 8.

Mandolin enters, then an unusual rhythm bed: gong and rain stick (I tried a lot of textures before landing those).

As the build continues, a more standard drum kit comes in, plus acoustic guitars for rhythmic lift.

I wrote the string parts by hand—layer by layer at the keyboard—rather than using an arranger algorithm.

Long electric-guitar sections stretch the middle and late movements before the final mantra takes over.

The scope felt big to me—not just for the runtime, but because that single line demanded an epic to match it.

A film companion

Because film sits at the heart of the idea, I cut a music video around release using public-domain black-and-white footage from The Last Man on Earth (1964, starring Vincent Price). (There’s a later colorized version, but the public-domain B/W had the haunted feel I wanted.) The projector sound design in the audio makes the pairing feel like you’re watching an old home reel run forward and backward, the leader finally slapping the hubs when it runs out.

What the song is saying

It’s the most human wish: let me undo it. Let the argument un-speak itself; let the leaving become a turning back; let the night rewind into light; let the fire that burned us build something worthy. Of course we can’t literally run the reel backwards—but the song keeps asking whether love, truth-telling, and repair can do the next best thing: re-make what’s been broken.

Why it stays with me

I recorded this reflection during social distancing and found myself wondering if even this “fire” could build something in us—through artists making and sharing work, through public life that turns toward the common good, through ordinary kindness as we stay in touch. That’s the hope I hold here: that we keep reversing what we can—turn the fight back into love—and let time build what we can’t.

Source: New Music Memoir (1).docx