As far as I remember, this song started out when the phrase "Stumbling through time" popped into my head and I wrote it on the whiteboard in the kitchen where Kat and I keep our shopping lists and occasionally promising artistic concepts. I think a short few weeks later I picked up my guitar thinking of how that song might actually go and the main "Stumbling through time and we are stumbling through time" chorus came out. I'm not remotely ashamed that I basically reached into the "borrow from Bowie" playbook and quickly settled on the walking baseline and the inflection of the words, which is nowhere near as pronounced as it felt like when I was doing it.

A number of the songs on this release came from a single evening of creativity that I basically ad-libbed a bunch of stuff and recorded it on my phone (including "December Song" which came out pretty much in its final form from a single unplanned, ad-libbed take, and "Tree School" though it had been percolating for some time previous). "Stumbling" was part of that process. Then I took the rough phone recording and imported it into Garage Band, picked a likely section, and sequenced a drumline to it. Then I abandoned the phone recording, extended the sequenced drums, and at some point later recorded some parts of the acoustic guitar at higher quality and some lyrics that were ready at the time. This also - by accident - yielded the doubled vocals which actually worked really well for the track and stuck around.

That was enough bits to start cutting and pasting to arrange the song - the idea being that I have a lot more time in front of a computer to do that kind of work than I can spend with a guitar to actually do a more responsible job of all this stuff. However, the chord sequence that exits the bridge under the beginning of the solo and subsequent key change (first, I believe, in a Seven Stars Panda song!) didn't come around until later as I was messing around with making the song more interesting that the initial verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure, which also both had the same chords.

At some point during the existentially and literally dark months of Winter of '16/'17 I had discovered that some of the Garage band keyboard sounds were actually pretty cool, and could be "played" from the laptop computer, providing another way to work on music that didn't require isolating myself in a quiet room with instruments for long periods of time. The horn parts to Stumbling (which I find to be utterly bitchin') were recorded on an airplane on the way back from a trip Kat and I took to New York in February of '17, and then further refined, I think, on the ferry back from Amy and Arya's wedding in early Summer of that year.

At some point the song kind of hit the tipping point of needing to exist and I re-wrote and re-recorded a bunch of the original ad-libbed lyrics to be not awful (arguably), finalized the key change and recorded the guitar solo and re-recorded all the acoustic guitar to be a continuous recording for the evolved structure of the song, and coasted into the seemingly endless series of tweaks that needed to actually call a song done, including to reacting to some of the super-useful feedback I got on the song.

This was probably the first song I started recording for this project, and definitely set the tone as a recording that would be fuller, more lush, much more willing to indulge sampled drums and keyboard sounds and double-tracking vocals and all those temptations that are so unseemly for a solo guy-with-acoustic-guitar project. Some songs I record make me cringe even as I love them, but this song makes me smile pretty much every time.

What's it about? I wrote these notes down to guide my attempts to finalize the lyrics: "A young couple hides within the ice dreams, at peace for now but hiding out from dark and threatening powers they have betrayed in the flush of their youth. Those supernatural shades seek them in their dreams and in their memories and are circling ever closer; they will find them soon. In this still, quiet, fraught place they contemplate the end of their youthful transgressions and the long still path into their sunset years." Huhn.