Firebird Union release ‘Stand & Wait’
‘Stand & Wait’ is the culmination of twenty years’ creative development, frustration and joy. Backed by ‘Ambers’, it is available to download and stream now.
Ross tells the story of this track, two decades in the making…
“It was first written around 2005 and brought to the band to become a Cedar song. X&Y had just come out, and we were hungry to be the next Coldplay, and so, I wrote a Coldplay song.
Despite a few attempts, there was a general feeling that it wasn’t good enough, and it was discarded—surfacing only on an acoustic EP and during a few open mic nights. Maybe it was half-baked, but deep down I knew it deserved to be the full Au Gratin.
The truth was, the arrangement—two guitars, bass, drums, and vocals—didn’t quite capture the scope of sound I had in mind. At the time, we simply didn’t have the resources to pull off anything more ambitious.
Yet it persisted. For the past 20 years, I’ve found myself singing it, playing it, and thinking what a damn good track it is—and how much I wanted people to hear it.
Fast-forward to 2019, and Firebird Union appears. A shortlist of potential songs is drawn up. Stand & Wait quickly rises to the top of that list.
Luckily, over those 20 years, the arrangement had been quietly refined and perfected in my head. I knew exactly how I wanted it to sound.
But it felt incomplete. It still wasn’t ready.
One day, while making coffee, I was singing it to myself when a counter-melody fell out of my mouth. “That would sound really cool on strings,” I thought. And then the obsession took hold. I grabbed my phone and recorded the line.
This song could only exist with strings. Real strings. Linear strings acting as a musical metaphor for movement, set against the static band elements. Chaos atop the calm. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it properly.
Write the strings. Write the score. Find the players. Could I be bothered to do this? It was the only way to finally get this song out into the universe.
And so, here it is. May 15th, 2025. Twenty years after being written on a battered guitar in a teenage bedroom in Watford.
Ironically, the song became an allegory for itself. Patience was the key to making it real. Rushing the initial version failed, and only by persevering until the song caught up did everything fall into place. No longer do we have to stand and wait.”