Carry Me Home

Where the previous track presses forward with purpose, this one leans back and aches. The tuba descends into something closer to a lullaby than a battle cry, and the two drummers — who elsewhere drive with relentless forward motion — here create a swaying, ceremonial pulse that feels ancestral. Hutchings' saxophone enters with a quieter register, his tone more burnished than piercing, as though he is singing rather than stating. The emotional core is exhaustion transformed: not defeat, but the bone-deep weight of a long journey that someone carried so that others would not have to. There is a blues feeling without the blues form — a grief that does not announce itself but seeps through every gap in the arrangement. The tuba ostinato repeats and repeats like a phrase spoken in prayer, and the accumulation of that repetition becomes its own kind of endurance. The track builds not toward explosion but toward a kind of luminous resignation, a collective sigh that contains both sorrow and gratitude in the same breath. This is music for late evenings, for sitting with something heavy that has no easy resolution — the kind of song you put on when you want the room to hold what language cannot. It asks for the same patience it demonstrates.