Every year I brace myself for Daylight Savings Time and every year it's just awful. Especially the first few days when you get home and the day just feels over and it feels like bedtime even though it's only 6pm. Why why WHY.
Right now I've got about an hour to kill before rehearsal with Explone. Lately I've been thinking about songwriting and creative work in general. Have you ever noticed that the creative stuff never gets any easier? If I wrote a thousand songs, I'd guarantee you that number one-thousand-and-one will be just as big a pain in the ass to finish. Or start, for that matter.
The flush of triumph that comes from finishing one song lasts exactly as long the time I waste putting off tackling the next one.
You could be the #1 World Champion Alligator Wrestler Of The Known Universe but you can only pose for photo-ops for so long before you have to get in the pit with another 15-foot monster.
Have you ever seen Dawn Of The Dead, the one with the mall? It feels like that sometimes. Each day that goes by where I decide to punt, to not wrestle that 'gator -- not today, at least, I mean, it's dark outside and I really need to learn HTML5 and this Castlevania demo ain't gonna play itself -- is another day closer to the day the dead shatter the glass doors and find my couch cushion fort in the furniture section.
And they'll get me, eventually. So it's either hurl myself back into the 'gator pit, or wait for the zombies and pretend to be all surprised when they get here. It's more interesting in the pit.
I went ahead and made instrumental versions of all the tunes on Look Back On This And Laugh so I'll keep posting them here over the next few weeks. Today's selection is "You Promised."
[audio:lbotal-mp3-instr/Scott Andrew - You Promised (instrumental).mp3|no_twitter=1|no_fb=1]
This is probably one of my favorite song arrangements. The feedback-like sounds that open the track are actually done with an ebow I borrowed from Patrick (of Explone). For this new album mix, I brought the guitars up front, added a touch of reverb to the drum track, and threw in a shaker to offset the hi-hat a bit.
Here's the full mix with vocals. Someday soon I'll have to post an acoustic version.
I mentioned earlier that I really liked the guitars in this mixdown, but now with vocals removed it occurs to me that the drum track is significantly better than what I usually come up with. I recently switched from FL Studio to Toontrack for drums, and the difference in quality is pretty amazing. (I still use FL Studio primarily for editing the MIDI drum track, though -- the pre-cooked Toontrack patterns are nice but just don't do it for me.) I'm not sure how they do their magic, but I like it.
This one was especially fun to do. I kept finding myself pushing instruments down instead of up, especially the chorus vocals which seemed so quiet I wasn't sure they were still intelligible. I also used a trick I learned in the studio with Explone: a second lead vocal, run through a distort-y, telephone-style mic and mixed just behind the "clean" vocal track (although in the studio, it was an expensive copper-plated mic thing — mine is just EQ and plug-ins).
Mostly, I'm really happy with the guitars. Just one acoustic and a ton of different electric tracks panned every which way. The mix is a little hissy with room noise but I find myself caring less about stuff like that these days.
I don't want to get into the lyrics too much except to say that everything in the song actually happened at some point, and the "Twin Cinema Plaza" mentioned actually exists, although I'm not sure it's still called that anymore.
It's been years.
Lyrics after the jump...
Whatever Happened To You
75, twin cinema plaza
painting lines on the sidewalks
in the summer
as I recall
your pockets were always empty
always bumming rides
to the old arcade downtown
sometimes I wonder
whatever happened to you?
sometimes I wonder
if you're still out there somewhere
yeah I wonder
whatever happened to you?
whatever happened to you?
summertime sky
blazing down on the highway
a mile from the curve
where your friend took a turn too fast
at seventeen years
I can leave you behind now
and one day we'll all look back on this and laugh
sometimes I wonder
whatever happened to you?
sometimes I wonder
if you're still out there somewhere
yeah I wonder
whatever happened to you?
whatever happened to you?
and you were waiting for me
impatiently
you couldn't wait for me to get here
how did we get here?
sometimes I wonder
whatever happened to you?
sometimes I wonder
if you were ever really me?
and I wonder
whatever happened to you?
whatever happened to you?
Wow, how already totally dated is all that? Separate devices for video, photos, blogging and Twitter? That'd all be taken care of with a single iPhone now. And what, no Facebook?!
That untouched guitar, though? That's eternal.
Posted October 6, 2010
“Indie rock: it’s not only yelping and glockenspiels. *Mostly*, but not *only*.”
Every year I brace myself for Daylight Savings Time and every year it's just awful. Especially the first few days when you get home and the day just feels over and it feels like bedtime even though it's only 6pm. Why why WHY.
