Jon Foreman- "I like old instruments, often better than newer versions. It's hard to describe, feels like old guitars bring a life and a story to the conversation. When you write songs on an old guitar the guitar tends to speak up for itself from time to time. "Yet" was written on an old National steel guitar that I bought at a pawnshop on tour. It was a finger-picking tune played with a slide and very unlike the version on the record. Tim and I both thought that the folk interpretation of the song didn't really rise to the potential of the melody or the lyric. We spent a day at my house trying to find the right instrument to carry the song. We tracked the acoustic and electric guitar that day. We stumbled on the bass intro later. We were singing the final version of the song down and I felt like the end bit wasn’t quite right. It needed a bit more to tell the story. So I wrote a new lyric to go over top of the chorus chord changes.
The song is about hope. Hope is always reaching towards the future, reaching for what has not yet come to pass. Once the hope is attained, it can no longer be called hope. Hope isn't the sort of thing you can pull out of your pocket and show off. Hope is a "holding on" of sorts, an expectant belief, a desire as of yet unfulfilled. I wrote this song from a really dark place, looking for some form of hope. And maybe searching for hope is a form of hope in itself. There's a moment of honesty when your mask drops, when you can no longer pretend to have it all together. When this pretense is gone you breathe in your first real breath. When you are no longer pretending to be something you're not, you're left with a truly honest assessment of the situation. Very little is left, "Faith, hope, and love remain. But the greatest of these is love."
Jon Foreman- "I like old instruments, often better than newer versions. It's hard to describe, feels like old guitars bring a life and a story to the conversation. When you write songs on an old guitar the guitar tends to speak up for itself from time to time. "Yet" was written on an old National steel guitar that I bought at a pawnshop on tour. It was a finger-picking tune played with a slide and very unlike the version on the record. Tim and I both thought that the folk interpretation of the song didn't really rise to the potential of the melody or the lyric. We spent a day at my house trying to find the right instrument to carry the song. We tracked the acoustic and electric guitar that day. We stumbled on the bass intro later. We were singing the final version of the song down and I felt like the end bit wasn’t quite right. It needed a bit more to tell the story. So I wrote a new lyric to go over top of the chorus chord changes.
The song is about hope. Hope is always reaching towards the future, reaching for what has not yet come to pass. Once the hope is attained, it can no longer be called hope. Hope isn't the sort of thing you can pull out of your pocket and show off. Hope is a "holding on" of sorts, an expectant belief, a desire as of yet unfulfilled. I wrote this song from a really dark place, looking for some form of hope. And maybe searching for hope is a form of hope in itself. There's a moment of honesty when your mask drops, when you can no longer pretend to have it all together. When this pretense is gone you breathe in your first real breath. When you are no longer pretending to be something you're not, you're left with a truly honest assessment of the situation. Very little is left, "Faith, hope, and love remain. But the greatest of these is love."