This is a box of photographs on a bookshelf in an empty home. A home where the sounds of her laughter, her humming melodies, and the mutterings of puzzle solving excitement once filled rooms. Rooms she used to inhabit. Rooms like dioramas, memories she inhabits no longer. The walls will echo these sounds. And those echoes become places we inhabit in her absence. She is no longer here, she is gone now. Gone unto a world of her own. Gone, for now. And so now we wait. Here inside a box of photographs. Inside a song. Inside an echo. We wait for her return. We wait for our daughter. We wait for thanksgiving.
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I wrote a good majority of these songs in October 2020 in an empty house in the final weeks of college. Down in my folks basement, converting my father's old demo tapes to digital, trying to preserve all his original songs from vanishing with the harvesting hand of time warping those memories captured on tape. I was waiting for a cassette to finish converting, staring at an old lamp my sister used to have when she was young, now collecting dust on a desk in the basement. A pink lampshade with bejeweled tassels. I was thinking about how this is one of those items that just doesn't make it to college. Something you leave behind when you enter a new life of independence. Something my folks maybe tried to set up in her dorm, if only to remind themselves that she is still connected to the child that fell nightly asleep beside this lamp. But which stayed behind, finding its way into the basement, illuminating the corner where I sit next to the box of my father's old tapes.

That night I wrote "Pink Lampshade".

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