Track 9 – “Words Can’t Say” – Behind the Song

My wife and I started dating in 2002, and I wrote this song for her within the first year after that. It was the first time I realized why all those clichés about love exist–things that make you roll your eyes when someone else is talking about them. But if I were pressed to talk about how she made (and still makes) me feel, I couldn’t say them better. With that in mind, I took several such clichés and put them one after the other. Despite all these things I can say, it cannot express how I feel, so the chorus latches onto that question. How can I tell you what words can’t say? And even if I could, is that something that can be understood?

I’ve recorded this song a couple of times before Objects in Mirror, but the original version has probably been heard by fewer than five people. The second was a recording I did so that it could be played at our wedding in 2007. The third was the release to streaming platforms in July 2023. But I was able to take the piano parts from that 2007 version and reuse them in the 2023 and in the Objects in Mirror versions of the song, so that it has that “something old, something new” flair in keeping with it being our wedding song.

For the Objects in Mirror version, I doubled the rhythm guitar on a different acoustic guitar to round out the sound a little more, and I adjusted the overall mix to allow the vocal to sit more nicely over the top of it.