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Sometimes the songs flowed easily and took shape quickly but Islands wasn’t one of those songs. While Gary, Bruce and Scott worked out the basics and tried a number of different approaches to finish the structure, George sat with his lyric notebook and listened, offering occasional suggestions but not singing anything. This carried on for a couple of weeks. We would work on it for awhile at each rehearsal then drop it and move on to work on something else. One night as we were wrestling with it again, George suddenly began furiously writing in his notebook. The entire melody and lyrics came to him all at once. Within a few minutes the song we had labored over for months had a melodic direction and we were able to finish it that night. The song is biographical in that it’s about the band itself being patient, grounded and focused. We felt we were like an island while the conditions of the world and everything in it moved around us. Learn more about the making of the album, Alchemy.
