Raising The Fawn: "Two Wives"

There ain't no such thing as a three-and-a-half minute song. Like free lunches, they exist only in our highly fallible perception of reality. Deep, right? I know. But seriously, looked at through the lens of an introductory philosophy class, it's kind of true. No song committed to tape or microchip is really three minutes long. They might be days, weeks, years long, constructed out of dozens of temporally overlaid audio tracks on a three-minute grid, plus hours and hours worth of submerged musical experience, including (but not be limited to): days locked in a room with a musician's musical instrument of choice, hours spent on microphone placement, countless re-takes, pep talks, digital error correction, stoned metaphysical conversations carried out sitting cross-legged beneath the mixing board, several changes of strings, an ideological argument about auto-tune, an ideological argument about whether or not drummers should be allowed to give opinions on auto-tune, a couple hissyfits, an intervention, hugs, and, of course, mixing and mastering. To treat a highly engineered, scrutinized, polished track as a realistic inhabitant of just three-and-a-half minutes is to turn a blind eye. Every recorded song is an artifice, and when you hit “play,” you enter into an implicit contractual agreement with the creators of the recording. That is, you promise to suspend your disbelief if they will promise to tuck the seams out of sight.

That is why the last seconds of "Two Wives," when the last strains of acoustic guitar fade and the metronome becomes plainly audible, is such a "what the fuck?" moment. Nowhere should the touch of the recording engineer be lighter than on a campfire song, which "Two Wives" surely aims to be. It's probably not an unintentional mistake, since Raising the Fawn are recording veterans, and probably not idiots. So it's there on purpose. But why? Is it a pointed comment on the fabricated nature of recording? An ironic play off of the album title (Sleight of Hand)?

I don't know. "Two Wives" is otherwise a pretty little amble through the mind of a desperate woman (as a nice touch, the song is written from the female perspective). There's a tinge of menace in John Crossingham's raspy falsetto as he threatens, "Leave behind the other or you'll never see the one you made / Grow into a child." In its best moments, "Two Wives" feels organic, the hidden hours of production buried deep beneath its coarse surface. The twang of the guitar strings has synaesthetic smoke coiling off of it, and you can almost hear the crackle of birch bark disintegrating into ash. If not for the beeps at the tail end of these three-and-a-half minutes, "Two Wives" would be a good, if unremarkable, song, not really worthy of mention. Maybe that's why.