The piece of the puzzle we struggled with the longest was the finale. Bop came up with lots of promising fragments, and I kept trying to find a way to string them together. We also knew we wanted to bring back the Leaf, and possibly some other previous material. One fragment was called Echoes, and I wrote basically an entire song (with no words) based on the hope that Bop would expand on this lyric, but it just never happened. The last piece he sent me that I set to music was the part that now opens the finale, "Constantly hanging on threads of time...", which I thought was exactly the direction we shoud be going. When I returned to "finish" this cycle in the summer of 2009 this piece was my biggest challenge.

The current finale (still called "Echoes," even though that lyric is not in it) was created by editing together the following: 1) the "Threads of Time" demo; 2) another bit of the original "Echoes," 3) a couple of giant chords that I recorded in 1999 for some other project, 3) the quiet middle section of the original "Flaming Skull," 4) a brief swirl of a Pigwind, and 5) the ending of one of my many Leaf demos.

Constantly hanging by threads of time.
Squeaking it out on the noose.
Compact and quartzed upon my wrist
yet in my hand it's so loose.

All the hounds, the cups and bones
and all the pigs they waylaid.
All the fences and barbs and barns
Yet none of the animals stayed.

Something they found inside themselves
(The men, they call them, "strays" )
is nothing at all about the noose
it's all about going away...

the pigs have all flown away...
and the hounds, they still smell today...
everbark and evergrowl and ever...
...it is today



down near the wilder saltlick
down near the thinnest of the thick

Down where our pinkied necks are picked
like roostertails in cockfights
like soupbones tossed in dogfights.

As if we are the leaf of Eve...
the fig.
As if we are the thinking thought-
ful pig..."