Some songs write themselves. They flow in bursts of intense emotion and uncontainted fire. Buried Alive was one of those songs that took what felt like just a moment to write.
Out of every song I’ve ever written and released Buried Alive is probably the most personal one to date. For months I wasn’t sure if I should record it, and even in the lead up to it’s release I still questioned myself every now and then about whether or not to share it. There is a love hate relationship with me and this track that to this day goes back and forth.
Life throws curve balls at you, and boy did it hit me a few years back. I wrote this track after the unexpected end of a relationship I didn’t see it coming. Now I have to put it out there that this person and I parted of pretty good terms. We even joked with each other about the fact I’d probably write and release a song about it too. But even so it’s a lot of mixed emotions to work through.
Those emotions became Buried Alive, a song that wrote itself in the space of a moment and became a vessle by which I could let go of the past and the pain.
To date the song’s I’d put out had always been polished versions of my experiences, still me but never the whole spectrum of emotion behind the memories they shared. I won’t do that anymore. No, here is as honest as it gets. The lyrics written in the heat of emotion on tear stained pages curled up in the corner of a quiet hallway. The music grittier and darker than ever before.
Recording the track was an absolute blast. In contrast to the sad message of the song I had an amazing time working with my producer Jared Adlam. There is nothing as fullfilling as finding someone who shares your vision and can understand where you want to take a song without having to explain every detail to them. I call Jared a wizard because the magic he brings to every song he touches makes me fall in love with my songwriting all over again. The session players he brough in for the project, Reece Baines and Zach Miller, were nothing but legends to work with. Hearing my song the way I’ve heard in my head for months finally come together is nothing short of incredible. Think giddy kid with a beaming smile level happiness sitting in the studio listening to it come to life.
There is no escaping the fact Buried Alive is a song about heartbreak. But for me it was far more than that. It’s a song that was a cathartic moment of finally letting free intense emotions I had been holding in. It’s a song that I learnt to appriciate for what it had done for driving a change in my sound and style. This darker more mature Americana sound had always been something I’d wanted to explore, but it wasn’t until I wrote Buried Alive that I had the opportunity to pursue it.
This blog post is probably a little more open than most but I feel it’s the shared experience we feel as human beings that really helps us to connect not only to the music but to one another.
One life may have ended when I wrote Buried Alive, but another started when I walked into that recording studio.
Catherine x
Catherine Gunther 