Sometimes I lose myself in my frustration
Perhaps of some bad romance
Stuck in a complicated situation
We escaped into the wildA million sunbeams seep through the trees
A thousand winds whisper in my ears
The Great Escape with our own staves
And the routes we choose to takeTo somewhere no one knows
To ease our sorrowful soulsI drown myself in my imagination
Breeze dancing in my hair
Watch the world spinning through my camera
The smell of autumn fills the air
Great Escape
“Great Escape” came about as a solo song following the breakup of The Tranquil Summer Sea, the acoustic duo I was in with a girl back in 2010. This was almost some kind of revenge, a response to questions about whether I could make a song resembling TTSS. Technically, I could, as you can listen to the first version on SoundCloud. But naïve was I. An Erik Piece song is an Erik Piece song; a TTSS song was great just because it was performed by TTSS, a gestalt that could never be achieved by just one of its separate parts.
As the lyrics suggest, “Great Escape” also drew a picture of my state as I felt so lost in deciding what to do with my music: to struggle with innisfallen, my rock band, or to explore something new with different musicians. It turned out that getting lost wasn’t that bad. I remembered Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken as I wrote this song… “the routes we choose to take”. I didn’t take the untrodden path, but, as we indie musicians here often say, “we earn money to feed music”.
Returning to the Stage
The song sounded fuller and more appealing to listen to with a band, as I insisted on keeping the bossa nova flavour. The song now sounded less like a TTSS song, or a Norweigian neo-folk duo you might have heard about. The video I’m showing here was taken during my own concert at a cafe called Fullcup. The sound engineer said, “you guys should really play a tour with this set of songs.” But we didn’t, for no specific reason. Perhaps life is always the reason. I “returned” to innisfallen, and shelved the whole memory about this Fullcup concert in a corner of my mind.
But with COVID restrictions in place, it’s been a while since I was able to organize any sort of performance, whether solo or with a band. How I long to organise another Erik Piece concert again!
