People often ask how to write a song, and in fact every song is different, coming into existence along its own path--but this one was really different.
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It started with an idea, an abrupt juxtaposition of a passage somewhere in The Psalms, which mentions that our lives are like books to God, and he can turn to the last page and read how it ends, against a popular gospel song which says "I read the back of the book, and we win." I thought it would be interesting to make that juxtaposition in a song, a first verse in which it says that our lives are like books and God can read the end before we get there, and a last verse which says that all of life is like a book, and God has published the end so that we can read it before we get there. So it was just an idea, and it was closely followed by a couplet--the first two lines of the verse, pretty close to the way they are. And then it waited for a week.
One week later I put those lines to paper (they had been on a pocket digital recorder), and started writing until I had what I took to be the complete verse. The two verses were identical but for the last two lines, which made the shift from our individual lives to the life of the world. I also thought that it would work with these two verses and an instrumental interlude between, something like Fork in the Road; I would have to come up with something really good for the instrumental to make it work. But at this point, I had no music at all.
A few days later I still had no music at all, and I wondered whether it would work as a rap. I tried reading it, but either it's not a very good rap or I'm not a very good rapper; it was also obvious that it was very short, if done that way, so I gave up the notion of a rap. However, I then vaguely remembered a Skillet song in which they talked all the way through, which I couldn't recall clearly and couldn't find (it's called Looking for Angels, and they do sing part of it), and actually although I didn't much like that song I thought it might work as an approach to this one. I also almost immediately remembered doing a couple of choral reading works in my high school days--Geographical Fugue (I had to look it up) by Ernst Toch, and something done in church with the line "too tired to tell to Timothy" which apparently has not found its way onto the Web. That gave me the notion of passing the lyrics from one vocalist to another; but it would need music.
At this point, the opening music of Listen by Fireworks (the great 1980s Christian rock band with Marty McCall, on their Live album) came to mind, and I thought that something that had that feel would work. I thus sat down at a Scorio.com editor and started with an opening chord into a frilly but eerie piano part.
The piano proved less difficult than I had anticipated, and soon I had reached the instrumental. I worked with making the lead and bass interweave against a piano part that continued in the same vein as the verse, and wrote eight measures. I played this much for Adam Young, who loved it and encouraged me to continue, but the best thing I could think to do at that point was repeat those eight measures and go into a four-part vocal harmony filler for two measures (hoping that I would still have four vocals if we ever got to do it), and then went back to the opening chord to run into the second verse.
I thought at that point the song was finished; I would have to put it on paper (or electronic paper, at least), which would take some time, but I had written the whole thing. I got the idea to stagger the voices at the end before I reached it, but I always intended for the piano to end on an odd abrupt note in the middle of what it was playing, much as the aforementioned Fireworks song does. I would periodically play it and listen, and I wasn't completely satisfied with it, but I liked it quite a bit.
It was that bit of dissatisfaction that got me: before I'd finished writing the end, I had decided that in the instrumental bridge I would add a voice or two as instruments, much as I did with Song of Joy, and so I went back and found the spot, adding two voices which played against both the guitar and each other. As I was writing them, I realized that even though they started out of synch with each other, they had the same number of syllables with the same accents, and I might be able to put lyrics to that section, creating a bridge.