ORIGINS & EARLY PERFORMANCES
This song emerged from the early days in The Windover House. The four singers lived together and were witnesses to each other’s life experiences. At the time Brittany was grappling with a pattern in a relationship that was toxic. Her needs would get overlooked or ignored. She would ask for help and wouldn’t find it. While listening, Ian remembered the advice he was told when he was a kid: that if you ever feel in real danger and need to get attention you don’t call for help, you yell “FIRE!” And the song was born.
When I need help
Can’t call for help
’Cause no one comes
So I’m calling fire
A NOTE FROM BRITTANY
“Fire” was one of the first songs I sang after breaking up with my first love. We had a long and toxic relationship that ended in scorched earth on my end. Encapsulating the rage and betrayal I felt into such a fierce (arguably threatening) song was a means of reclaiming the no-bullshit badass I had been before I lost myself in this other person.
What always blows me away about being in this band is that Ian wrote “Fire” from my perspective after a conversation we had. I’m very lucky to have a brother who can tap so deeply into my emotional world and translate it into a song that empowers me and that we then take into the world to empower others.
- Brittany
The band put together an arrangement that sizzled and then roared! It was one of the most high energy songs on the set list in the early days and would often be the closer or encore. Here is a performance from a Summer Series in Atlanta, GA in 2011.
RECORDING
Because the song did so well live it was shortlisted for the album. Alex Wong flew down to Durham to work on pre-production before they headed to the Fidelitorium in Winston-Salem, NC to begin record. This is video of what that pre-production felt like. The band did this for every song on the album to make sure we knew exactly what each member was going to play as soon as we got in the studio.
Big discussions were had about the tempo, feel, percussion and vocal treatments. The song’s expression was getting refined as the definitive version was getting recorded, which is hard to do for such an emotional and high-energy piece of music.
You can feel the edge in some of these conversations and you can feel the edge in the final recording.
THE TONIGHT SHOW
For our second appearance on The Tonight Show they selected Fire as the track they would like to feature. Although it is rare that the band plays it live these days, it was the first time they discovered Brittany’s voice for justice and rage — a force of nature that has led the band to write many more songs in this vein.