Before I Got There

Lyrics

The acrid smell of burning branches
The relics all in ruin
Broken blades atop the altar
Cheap substitutions
And the tapestry* above
Torn down, trampled, then re-hung
Now illegible forever
An oracle with no tongue

All of this
All of this
All of this before I got there

And in a pit behind the altar
The bodies of the fallen
Heavy tracks up to the lip
Just to prove that they were crawling
Faces turned toward the sky
That they would never see again
Victims of the fallout
I have failed you—sweet, young men

All of this
All of this
All of this before I got there

Banter

I don't know how well I can play this song, I have not played it live yet. It's on Dark in Here and it's in fact, possibly the first song I wrote for that album, and possibly the first I wrote of the whole bunch that wound up being Dark in Here and Getting into Knives, which were all written in a concentrated burst of activity that was like, the most intense such burst since I wrote Sweden and Nothing for Juice in the same nine months, right? It was wild, and I thank my family for tolerating that, 'cause I get pretty manic when that happens, but this one happened, uh, and it was kind of grisly, and I just got the idea to play it at soundcheck, so I don't have it printed out or anything, so this is just the original draft, right? I noticed that there's some lyrics were bad, and I fixed those. This is a song that's about the feeling that the disaster was unavoidable and your role, in being present for it, was only to bear witness, which is not a fun role. (2021-09-17 Tower Theatre)
It was just this sort of vision of somebody coming across the place where something awful happened. As you might imagine, that's the sort of thing that inspires me. (2021-09-24 Gateway City Arts)
JD: I'm asking Matt about the chord changes, because I would always watch for these two to switch places. [Plays two piano chords, a Cm and Fm] Which one will come first? It's, it's, yh'know, that's the fun of the song.
Matt (I think): It's a surprise!
JD: Everybody finds the song really fun for that reason. The band loves it. What chord's he gonna go to, I wonder, they say to themselves. They're super into it. They send me physical mail about it: John, thanks for going to the C minor when it was an F minor in the song [very close to mic] you wrote. This is called Before I Got There. It's actually my favorite one. [three people woo] So were the three people who said woo, those are my people. I love it so much that I refuse to learn the chord sequence. I feel that would be a violation of the intimacy between myself and the song. (2023-10-02 Belly Up Tavern)
On violin, electric guitar, Isa Burke! [raucous cheering] It's not gonna happen, but Jon started doing that and I was like, we should have a drum solo now. [enthused cheers] It's not gonna happen tonight, but I wanna plant the seed. Get the concept going.
Matt (?): It's like the solo break, but for the drummer.
JD: Precisely. (2023-10-05 August Hall)
So I'll tell you a secret about –– well, it's mainly about me, I can't really speak to anybody else. But like ... when you do what I do, people assume that the louder I get, the more I mean it, right? But the getting loud, that's just second nature to me, right? Like I could get loud about stuff I don't actually care about. Like [unint.] you go 'whoa, he was really upset about the Anglo-Saxons!' but actually I'm just amusing myself, right? So ... but with me, you can tell how into a song I am by how I almost disappear in it, like the quieter it gets, the more excited I am about the song. This is called Before I Got There. (2023-12-03 Aura)

Live Performances

Footnotes

* Variant: "canopy" instead of "tapestry" (2023-10-03)