I wasn’t sure I wanted to release this song without re-recording, remixing, re-doing pretty much everything. I liked the idea of the song, but the execution wasn’t perfect. But it’s been 5 years since its Rosemary’s Baby-like birth, 
and even if I go back to retouch it, the “pandemic version” deserves its own place in the world. It clawed its way into existence and paved the way for the rest of The Silver Solace songs to exist. So who am I to stop it? I’m certainly not the alpha.
The song opens with a cry in a tongue that resembles human singing, but is unrecognizable and unsettling. This signals we’re transporting to a dream realm, just outside reality. In dreams, places, people, and objects are just real enough to fool us into making sense of them. Our minds make sense of sensations that were never meant to be defined or described. But, as if on cue, our bumbling brains bastardize these ephemeral shadows and naively declare: “Oh, that’s a person! Oh, that’s a house!” Songs and lyrics are the same as dreams. They’re better off without us distilling them into a limited-dimensional world with our limited vocabularies of reality.
Next, you hear the bass, which almost sounds as if it’s submerged just under the surface of the water. You’re aching for the grounding of a solid bass note, some kind of sign that you’re on stable ground. But the bass undulates in a wobbling jumble like a suspension bridge on its final tether. It’s a carnival mirror laughing back at your wary reflection.
Within the dream realm, we meet someone who is dreaming. A dreamer in a dream. We’ll call her The Dreamer. The Dreamer is sleeping to escape a real-life nightmare: a world transported online, disconnected from others. Working from home and living too close to someone else. They’re literally breathing in and out, back and forth, each other’s air.
The Dreamer finds herself in a bedroom in an old, turn-of-the-20th-century house. The room hasn’t been updated or changed in any way, so she’s left to assume maybe she herself is from this era. The children's blank eyes in the paintings stare back at her with a vacant yet prescient gaze. There’s a warning hidden somewhere behind the chipping paint.
In a moment of abandon, The Dreamer forgets herself. She might have thought for a moment that she was in her own home. She lets herself play, jumping on the old rickety bed and reaching up into the ceiling of the unknown. Gleeful, blissful, careless. As The Dreamer bounces and extends her arms, an older woman emerges from the ceiling, her long, outstretched, bony fingers grasping back. They claw and scratch with the strike of the guitars– unsettled and unbridled. Her fingers and her position above, on the ceiling, declare her dominance.
The Dreamer realizes this is the matron of the house, The Alpha, a presence that has been there all along, but she only now becomes chillingly aware of. The Dreamer knows she is not safe, and she is certainly not in charge. When it comes time to sleep that night, The Dreamer stares up at the ceiling, where The Alpha had appeared earlier. 
She knows that if she falls asleep, The Alpha will invade her mind in her dreams and take total control. The Dreamer attunes her attention to every creak in the floorboard and listens to every breath in and out to examine if it belongs to her or her tormentor.
As our song closes out, The Dreamer is plagued by the uncertainty of whether she’s asleep or awake, whether she’s in a dream or a real-life nightmare, and the agony of not knowing which one is worse.
The idea for this song came from an actual nightmare of mine, and the title came from my list of song titles I keep in my Notes app. I loved the idea of pairing this title with this song because of the elements of female power in the dream, and what an alpha bleeder is. An alpha bleeder is someone who, when in close proximity to others who menstruate, pulls everyone onto their menstrual cycle.
They bleed the way, so to speak.
I’ve always been fascinated by this concept. Science has not proven this, but anyone who menstruates who has lived with other bleeders knows… this is real.
I have since found that “the woman on the ceiling” is not an uncommon tale in horror stories and nightmares. I’d never heard of it before, but in some ways, I’m grateful that she chose to haunt me in my dreams. Perhaps The Alpha in my dream had a story she wanted to tell, and she took her rightful place in my psyche to share it in this way.
So with that, I present to you, Alpha Bleeder.
**Many thanks to Teresa Demel for the brilliant illustrations.**