ORIGINS
On November 7, 2011, in the Windover house in the woods of Durham, Ian came into the kitchen to play a song for Eric and Delta Rae’s manager, Adam Schlossman. Eric listened while eating a burrito, and near the end of the song, Adam picked up the camera and started recording.
In the video Ian mentions that the song came out of Steve Jobs’ recent passing as well as conversations with Eric about Graveyards, which the brothers occasionally walked through around Durham. But more significantly, Ian had recently suffered two losses that he was still processing: The sudden and tragic death of one of his childhood best friend, and the death of his mentor, Reynolds Price, who he had lived with and taken care of for a year before starting the band.
A NOTE FROM IAN:
Dance in the Graveyards is a visceral response to losing two beloved people in my life:
1. One of my two best friends from high school, Eric Houts, who tragically took his own life in 2010.
2. That same year, my friend and mentor, Reynolds Price, who suffered a heart attack, fell into a coma and passed weeks later.
I’ve always had a negative reaction to the phrase “Rest In Peace” and after these two dear souls left our world, I came to understand why. The idea behind “Rest In Peace” is beautiful, wishing the departed a chance for respite and sanctuary in the hereafter. But in practice, a person’s death is often lazily met with sparse initials — R.I.P. — and asked to move along in favor of more urgent news items.
I didn’t want that for my friends. These were full-blooded humans, strange and complex, who brightened and enriched my life. I didn’t wish rest for them. Not yet. For a young man who had succumbed to despair before experiencing so many of life’s greatest gifts and a pain-ridden paraplegic genius who worshipped at the altar of beauty, I wanted MORE. More dancing. More JOY.
I sought to disrupt the rigid ruts of language that allow our loved ones to leave and be peacefully forgotten. I wanted to acknowledge that the natural forces of life — gravity, time, entropy — seek to pull us down:
All of us, we’re meant for the fire
But that we defy those forces daily:
But we keep rising up and walking the wire
A paraphrasing of the Buddhist poem:
I’m of the nature to grow old.
I’m of the nature to get sick.
I’m of the nature to lose people I love.
I’m of the nature to die.
So how, then, shall I live?
The truth is that since becoming an adult, I’ve loved graveyards. Like many kids, I once found them scary, but as I experienced the deaths of people close to me, they’ve become places of great solace and commune. I used to ride my bikes through giant, hilly cemeteries in Durham and think of how many memories swirled in those expanses of grass, stone, trees, and pregnant silence.
The idea of dancing in a graveyard is as jarring to our sense of decorum and etiquette as the dismissal of “R.I.P.” is to our entrenched sense of language for mourning. And that’s the point. We need new and better ways of mourning. Personal ways. Creative. Living. Ways of keeping those who’ve died alive in our hearts and memories. Dance in the Graveyards is a rhythmic prayer, a rebellious hymn meant to honor the vital souls of those we’ve lost and let us keep dancing with them through the years and many-colored moments we have left.
- Ian
EARLY PERFORMANCES
The band coalesced around the song quickly. Everyone loved it and it felt so good to play! The harmonies fell into place immediately and the rhythm of three triplet hits on the bass drum followed by two claps became a percussive signature of the song.
The first live performance of the song actually came at SXSW in March of 2012, when the band was asked to busk outside the Warner Music Showcase. Here you can hear them rehearsing the song outside of the venue, Zona Rosa, in Austin before the audience is allowed into the area.
The song quickly became a high point of live shows and then worked its way to being a pinnacle at the very end of the concert. In preparing for the After It All tour, Eric had the idea of bridging the song into a cover of I Wanna Dance With Somebody. Here is one of the band’s performances from the After It All Tour at the TLA in Philadelphia in 2015.
The mashup was such a joyful moment that the songs are now attached at every concert the band plays, although sometimes they include other dance covers as well. Here is a clip from our show in Chicago in 2019 to give you the band’s view of this euphoric moment in the song.
RECORDING
Dance In The Graveyards was written just before the band went into the studio to record Carry The Fire so it almost didn’t make the cut, but we’re so glad it did. The drums were mostly recorded in a small studio apartment in Brooklyn, NY. Here’s a clip of the lengths the band had to go to in order to track something as simple as the claps. It was a labor of love.
This song turns fear of death into a moment of joy. It makes the band joyful to record (see below) and perform. It makes our audiences joyful to hear and dance to. It’s a great example of the alchemy art gives us and it’s an important first example of Delta Rae grappling with death in our music.