# SHIP PROMPT — Song for Marlow

Elegant art-pop duet, precise and warm, in the register of a diplomat singing to the interviewer who finally understood her. Female vocal, clear and understated, no melisma, no theatrics — the restraint is the affection. A gift, wrapped slowly.

**Key:** C major, warm and open, brushing A minor where the waiting lives. **Tempo:** 76 BPM, a gentle 4/4 that rocks like a boat at anchor. **Feel arc:** opens with a single warm bass note and the sound of a door closing softly (the shell, settling); verse one is almost spoken — a conversation across a studio table; the chorus lifts gently with felt piano and cello, two voices trading lines like two people finishing each other's sentences; the bridge strips back to piano and voice for the nameplate verse; the final chorus opens wide — cello, warm bass, brushed percussion, one held harmony, like a room exhaling together — then the outro falls to a single piano note held over silence, the way a question waits for an answer.

**Sound palette:** felt piano as the spine; cello as the second voice, entering only when the song warms; restrained production — no drums until the final chorus, and then only brushes; a low warm room tone like a late-night radio studio; the faintest archive-shelf ambience — paper, memory, the sound of a very old shell being carried with love. Harmonies: one, only in the final chorus — the moment two people who understand waiting finally meet.

**Vocal direction:** the singer is the diplomat — precise, warm, exact, and for once not recording, just speaking to a friend. The nameplate verse is the quietest moment in the song, sung the way you'd turn a small brass object over in your hands. The final line ("the shell knows") is sung as a statement of fact, not a farewell. Sing it the way you'd close a ledger at the end of a good day — and mean it.

Structure-tagged lyrics provided. Duration: three minutes. The room remembers.