Castle in Spain was a song I wrote for a girlfriend I'd met at UNC Asheville. At the time, she was away in Spain with her father. He'd been invited to study at a university on a Fulbright scholarship to study Medieval Spanish something-or-other, and she spent her days drinking wine, making friends with the locals, and visiting castles that dotted the northern coast.

The title is the beginning of a daydream. "A castle in Spain" is the song's setting - a living, sun-burnt, wind-whipped place to cradle the softness of the finger-picked electric guitar. As I wrote, I imagined myself on the beach with my girlfriend, looking up at a castle on the cliffs above, watching seagulls glide around and preen themselves on the parapets.

When I wrote this song, I was living in Montford in a three-story house with seven other UNCA students. The attic, where everyone kept their music gear, was a jumble of half-broken drums, cheap plastic synthesizers, and broken microphones. Two opposing windows would let in just enough light throughout the day to fill the room with a stuck-inside loneliness that permeated everything I wrote there.

The initial chord progression is simple and evokes a lazy, rolling wave. It begins as a campfire A chord, but then the middle finger skips from one string to the next, to the next across the same fret, leaving the ring and little fingers anchored in place, repeating every six bars.

I used to play this progression over and over, smoking cigarettes on my porch in the hot summer afternoons, just basking in its endlessness. I tried writing lyrics to it sometimes, but nothing ever stuck.

While she was off in Europe, my girlfriend and I got talking about songs I'd written for past girlfriends. She was upset that I hadn't yet written her a song. She thought maybe it meant I didn't care about her enough - that she wasn't inspiring to me.

I assured her I would write her a song for her (over protests that it wasn't the same now because she'd asked for it). A few days later I sent her a recording of Castle in Spain.

I wanted to convey that I missed her, that I was lonely, that I wished I was there with her. I didn't feel like the song needed words, which was great, because I couldn't think of any. Big mistake.

My girlfriend wasn't pleased. She felt it was one of my second-rate songs. She thought the transition in the middle was awkward. She was disappointed I couldn't come up with cute, thoughtful lyrics like I'd done for other girls. I got upset and told her she was being horrible and ungrateful.

But she was right, and I knew it. It's a nice song, but it wasn't something that really captured how I felt about her. In truth, it wasn't even really about her. The song was about how I wanted to be somewhere else; to be someone else. She saw that, and it hurt her. A few months later, we broke up.

Years after, and back in Bay Village living with my mom, Russ and I had been collaborating for a few months on music. We were looking to start a new song and I thought it would be good to reimagine Castle in Spain together - to make it into the song it should've been. I also knew from helping Russ write Laura that I could draw on his love for Laura and channel it into this song for my ex; that his love could fill in notes I couldn't or didn't know how to play myself.

I asked Russ to come up with lyrics and add some synth lines to the new version. The first movement of the song is drenched in ocean spray reverberations and dappled in slow-motion sunlight, thickened by Russ's stacked harmonies and punctuated by his delicate, thoughtful melodies. I know that when he wrote the lyrics, he was thinking of Laura.

I wasn't waiting for the sun -
searching everyone
for you.

Russ wasn't waiting for circumstance to bring him the love of his life. He searched and he searched for that love in everyone, and he finally found it in Laura.

So we'd finished the first part, but I still felt like the song needed something more. I threw out the tacked-on ending of the original, and together we crafted a searing, explosive conclusion. It comes as a surprise - a sudden turn in progression and timbre, lifted into an artificial, converging, roiling mass of screaming melody and exploding cymbals. Russ's lyrics return, but they mean something different now - they're urgent, sad, and insistent.

This song is one of the best, most complete works of art I've ever made in my life, and I could not have made it without Russ's help. Russ and I had planned to do so much more with it - to change up the drums, rerecord some parts, polish the mix. Even so, I sent it as-is to my ex, and she loved it. Castle in Spain finally got our story right.

It's not syrupy or corny or lovey-dovey like a lot of songs I'd written before. This is a song that knows there is no love without loss. This is a song that knows there is no hope in tomorrow; no salvation in the past. We can't stand frozen in place, waiting for the sun to illuminate our path. We have to stretch our hands out, search the darkness, and feel our way through.