Ghost did very little upon release and was quickly forgotten. For it to suddenly see so much attention over three years later was a real surprise. The spot was playing in Europe quite a bit, and people were suddenly checking out the project. I was in the middle of recording “The Roots” when I was asked to quickly put together an EP as a follow up. 

I was given two weeks, which for the way I work, is very little time. Touch The Sky was the result. Luckily, I had a few half finished songs ready to go, so the time limit was manageable.

(Description borrowed from the liner notes for "Ghost")

I was trying to capture the feeling of returning to where you're from after you've moved away. There's a deep comfort in being somewhere so familiar, but it's paired with the realization that things have moved on without you. You were once a fixture in this home, or this landscape, and now you are a visitor. It's simulataneously cathartic and alienating, and I wanted the song to be joyous and bittersweet at the same time. The wordless chorus was written with the idea of letting out a big feeling that you don't have proper language for. 

The song was recorded over three days, with most of the time spent on the layered vocals in the chorus. I recorded them about 30 times each, at different distances. The percussion on the song came from stomping on a piece of plywood and handclaps, and was chosen because I didn't have any drums at the time. Whenever working on music or art, I like the principal of "use whatever you have on hand instead of waiting for the perfect arrangement." I think the limitations I was dealing with made the song more interesting in the long run.

Just before I started recording Ghost in 2006, I found a piano in a local ad that said “Free if you are willing to move it yourself!” It wound up in my shed a few days later. When I had it tuned, I was informed that the top and bottom octaves were hopeless and the rest of the piano had three or four tunings left in it. It survived about two more years. 

Doorways was the last thing I recorded on it before setting it on fire in a video. But when Welcome Home suddenly started doing well in 2010, and I was throwing this EP together, I decided to revisit the song and add some vocals and drums. The instrumental always felt sentimental and nostalgic, so I decided to write about things I used to believe when I was young – ones that faded, or were destroyed, with time and life experience.

I wasn’t unhappy with the track. I just felt I’d already covered a lot of similar ground already, and it was really short. But when I had to quickly put this release together, I remembered it and tracked it all in one sitting.

It sets up the events in the song "Glory." see the album "Ghost" I was working on this song alongside “Winter is Coming” from Ghost. It was another piece where I was trying to push myself compositionally – using multiple sections, time signature changes, and leaning heavily on a narrative structure. 

I think the lyrics are pretty self-explanatory. But I remember wanting to write about how overwhelming it must have been, being brought into that scale of war at such a young age, and how many people simply aren’t built for it.