For two years we met on Thursday nights in a chapel that a church let us use because nobody else wanted it after dark. The heating did not work. We prayed in coats.
We did not go there to write. We went because several of us were in a stretch of life where church on Sunday was too loud and too fast.
One night somebody lit a single candle because the lights had failed again. We sat with it. Somebody hummed a line. Then somebody else added a second line, and we sang those two lines for perhaps forty minutes.
Nothing about it was clever. That was the point. Elijah did not find God in the wind or the fire but in the quiet afterwards, and we had all had enough wind.
When we recorded it, we kept the room. You can hear a chair creak and the building humming. We were asked to clean that up and we said no. It is the honest sound of people waiting.
If you sing it, sing it slowly. It was never meant to go anywhere in a hurry.
