Hey Tammy,

Yeah the demos for my songs always tend to be quite long, but once I get used to playing the song and playing around with tempo they go faster. I recorded this as a demo and work-in-progress. The song was barely two weeks old when I recorded the video. This one has become more upbeat at 120 bpm as opposed to the 100-105 range I was playing in the video. smile

The idea for the rivers was that rivers are supposed to be tears of pain, which represent all the sad and hurtful things that people have felt in their lives that they can't share with others. When people are hurting, they usually hide it from people and put on a happy face, so when you look at them from the outside, they seem fine even though inside, they are hiding something very hurtful. ("There are rivers you will never see/Behind these eyes/Behind this smile" ; "The world only sees the calm and the glow, so no one else knows the soul beneath the light") And everyone has things that they never tell anyone else. So you could know someone your whole life and yet never really know them. ("Even if you try there are too many miles/to ever see it all" ; "And the closer you are, the farther away you go.") Most people are afraid to let other people see their pain, so we often keep it to ourselves. ("'Cause there are rivers rivers rivers, that you will never see.")

Basically, everything is not really as it seems with people. Someone could seem all calm and peaceful, like everything is just peachy (the first two verses), but there is an undercurrent of melancholy that no one ever gets to know and can't be shared (the third and fourth verses). smile

Yeah we do seem guitar heavy on these boards. Even in the local songwriter group which I'm a part of in my area, I am kind of the odd one out with being a keyboard player. grin

Thanks for listening! grin