Five in the morning. The house still asleep. Coffee before the first chord.
There's a moment — usually around 5am, before I've had coffee — when the house is so still that the song already exists. I just have to be quiet enough to hear it.
"Still in the Air" started like that. I woke up with a melody in my head that wasn't mine yet. I didn't want to wake anyone, so I sat on the kitchen floor with the guitar instead of a chair — somehow the floor felt more honest at that hour — and the first verse came in maybe twenty minutes. It's the part of the song I changed the least.
The chorus didn't come for two weeks. I tried writing it three times and threw all of it away. Then one afternoon I was driving — nowhere in particular, just driving — and the line "what stays with us, even after they're gone" arrived fully formed, and I had to pull over to the side of the road to remember it. I sat there in the car with the engine still running, saying it out loud over and over until I found my phone.
The bridge took several months.
I think bridges are the hardest part of any song. The verse and chorus already know each other. The bridge has to be the part that surprises both of them, and still belongs.
I had a placeholder for almost five months. The chord was wrong and I knew it. The three lines I'd written there were temporary from the very first day — I could feel it every time I sang through the song, this small drop, this moment where the song stopped believing in itself. But nothing I tried was better. Everything felt like it was reaching for the song instead of coming from inside it.
"Some songs are quick. Some songs ask you to keep showing up for them, slowly, for a long time."
What finally worked came from my grandmother. Two days before the bridge finally clicked, we'd been on the phone, and she said something that I've been thinking about ever since: "The people we lose don't go away. They just change shape." She said it very simply, the way she says most things, like it was obvious. Maybe it is. But I hadn't heard it like that before.
I dropped a chord, slowed the rhythm by half, and wrote one line built around what she'd given me. The rest of the bridge built itself around that in maybe an hour. After five months, it took an hour.
Recording it, in one room.
We recorded "Still in the Air" the way I record most things: at home, in one room, mostly in one take. The first take was too careful. I'd been waiting so long to finally record the finished song that I played it like I was afraid of breaking something — every breath controlled, every note placed. It was technically cleaner. It was also completely lifeless.
The second take I overcorrected. I tried so hard to feel it that I ended up performing the feeling instead of just having it. I remember listening back and thinking: that's not me, that's someone doing an impression of me.
The third take I stopped trying. I just played the song. And when I heard it back — the quiet before the chorus, the breath I almost held, the chair creaking around the second minute — I said out loud to no one in particular: that's it. That's the one.
We left the chair creak in.
If you've listened to the song already — thank you. If you haven't, it's here. Either way, I hope it finds you on a slow morning.
The music video.
If the song means something to you — a like, a comment, or a subscribe on YouTube means more to me than you'd think. It's the simplest way to help a small song find its way to more quiet mornings. ♡
