Lily started with a hand-written lyrics sheet, but I wanted to follow along which meant getting it typed up:

Have you ever seen the mountain tips
In the moonlight? Oooooh
Have you ever been on the road
Of the years gone by? Oooooh
Have you ever been down the path
Of possibility? Oooooh

Have you ever, have you ever
Seen the moon, ooooh oh the
Moooo–oh-oh-oon, oh the
Moooo–oh-oh-oon, oh the
Moooo–oh-oh-oon, oh

Have you seen the
Oh, all the years gone by
Looking up at the night sky
Even all the days and nights
Are nothing compared to the Stars up so high

Even if you think about
All the nights
Some are cloudy
Some are nice
But they all have one
Thing in common, it's the
Moooo–oh-oh-oon, oh the
Moooo–oh-oh-oon, oh the
Moooo–oh-oh-oon, yeah the
Moon

Have you ever seen all the places in the night
Some are lit by starlight and others are quite bright
But they are all lit by one other light
It's the

Moooo–oh-oh-oon, oh the
Moooo–oh-oh-oon, oh the
Moooo–oh-oh-oon, oh the
Moooo–oh-oh-oon, oh

All the nights
Are lit by
The Moon

Then we sat together as I messed around with chords, figuring out what worked on the piano. Several times I had chords I liked but Lily wanted something else—I deferred since this was their project. We ended up with these chords.

I set us up for multitrack recording (vocals, foot drums, keyboard) and we recorded a bunch of takes. In retrospect I think the song would have come out better if we'd built it up a track at a time: there were things I wanted to fix in my keyboard playing that I couldn't because Lily had picked up on them and was singing differently to compensate. If they want to do this again I'll probably suggest that approach.

With some technical advice from friends I mixed it down to a base track, and then Lily recorded vocal overdubs. They got very into this, and I just left them alone for a while with Reaper to record take after take. After a while I came back and we comped together. We wanted a bit more percussion so I did a bit of egg shaker on top.

Once we had the music finalized we went and got a bunch of footage. I suggested doing the thing where you play the music and sing along to it so the video matches closely, but when we tried this in public places Lily (understandably!) found it too embarrasing. Instead we just recorded a lot of video of them doing things around our neighborhood, and on a small Kingfisher tour in Maine.

We sat down with iMovie and put it all together. Overall, I'm not a big fan of how iMovie's interface works for music videos: audio-video alignment is key but there's no way to lock clips to the audio. But we did it in one pass, selecting what to put next and then moving on, which mitigates this.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out!