Producer's Diary: The Birch Reserve - Window Panes
At the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean lives a mermaid. She’s 7,851 km long, weighs 11,000 tons, and stretches from Kristiansand to Avon-by-the-Sea. Her name is HAVFRUE (Norwegian for “mermaid”), and she isn’t like other water nymphs.
Her parents are Google and Facebook, and she has millions of Americans and Northern Europeans to thank for her continued existence. They pump a daily stream of emails, transactions, and p0rn through her sole artery at a rate of 108 terabytes per second. Without her, this song wouldn't have been possible.
To be clear, HAVFRUE is an undersea cable. And, in late 2021, she shepherded the demos of “Window Panes” across the ocean with her fiber-optic insides. Jackson had just begun a grad program at the University of Oslo and was on a hot streak of song starters. Each morning, I would wake up with a new idea in my inbox.
From what I understand, Norway has some of the fastest internet in Europe. And that had to have been a consideration when Jackson chose to go to school there. He’s the most computer-oriented person I know; he triple-boots operating systems, works as a software engineer, and lurks Russian piracy forums. Broadband is important to him, and a finicky connection won’t do.
On the other side of the Atlantic, I was on a 50 mbps connection (slow) piped into a Hamptons summer cottage (long story) through a router from 2006 (old). My 75-year-old landlord had land-snored his way through a decade-and-a-half of upgrades, and it took about as much time for Jackson’s recordings to download.
Although Jackson wrote most of the lyrics, the chorus sounds like how we both felt back then. He was mid-adjustment to a Scandinavian culture where people react to small talk like they do a loogie on the sidewalk. Stateside, I was overweight, underemployed, and surrounded by top-of-the-tax-bracket ballers who might allow themselves a flagel as a Saturday-morning treat.
Winter didn't help either of us feel more at home. As the new year approached, Jackson became increasingly surrounded by darkness. On one Zoom call, I could barely see his face. “What time is it there?” I asked. “Almost two PM,” he said.
I reached for a Snus.
In Norway, nicotine is popular. In the Hamptons, less so, but it still has its die-hards. My landlord’s brother, who happened to be the maintenance guy, loved to vape. We’ll call him Spyros. The mere sight of me was enough to make him drain his tank of e-juice. There wasn’t an imbecile as dim as me on the whole East End.
First, the furnace wouldn't relight. Then, an overnight blizzacaine froze the pipes. When I awoke, the side door had blown open, a foot of snow had piled up inside, and the kitchen faucet froze mid drip. When Spyros responded to my SOS, he dragged an electric space heater down to the crawl space, placed it in a puddle of standing water, and aimed it at the cottage’s main pipe. “Leave it on ’til April,” he said.
That was the most we had spoken at any one time. Normally, we just said hello, but if he was feeling talkative, he might say “cocksucker” a few times under his breath while he worked.
Still not sure if that referred to me.
Needless to say, the more Jackson and I stayed where we were, the less we felt so sure of ourselves.