It’s 12:12 am as I type this…hey, I used to be an 11:11 person, part of a loosely knit cult of people who always seem to look at the clock when it’s 11:11. Whew, now it’s 12:13, so I can get off this tangent.
“Clap For Youself” got all clogged up. What a shame. The song came very easily. The riff and chorus lingered for a couple of months, swimming circles in my head, effortless but not going anywhere. However, once it moved past there the floodgates opened and it was done in a matter of days. Recording it, however…I can bang my head against the wall. Wait…I don’t really have access to a wall…it’s covered by furniture and a very large cactus. Yeah, I can bang my head against the cactus . Ow.
Since I don’t like dents in my forehead, nor pricks, I switched gears and decided to record Avalanche. Avalanche is one of my cat’s favorite songs, and I play it often, so I knew I could nail it without too many takes. I wrote it when I was in The Pollynoses, and recorded it with Major Matt in his East Village apartment/studio. I loved the recording, as well as how the band played, but I hated my vocals. I don’t know, I haven’t listened to that version in years, so I’m not sure if I was being over critical, or the vocals really did ruin everything else. Nevertheless, this week I needed to record something, anything, and this was my well rehearsed go-to.
The recording is far from done, but I didn’t want to wait too long before posting on my blog. As hoped, I layed down the basic guitar & vocal tracks pretty quickly. Now I’m building the drum rhythms with the software.
I think I may have the opposite of Attention Deficit Disorder, in that I can sit still for over an hour building drum loops then copying and pasting them, copying and pasting. The rhythm in this song skips beats now and again to accommodate the lyrics. which forced me to focus on shorter building blocks which made it a more daunting task.
I must mention that the theme of this song is about how political disharmony can be detrimental to personal relationships, which I think is very relevant in today’s climate. I was trying to open it with poetic imagery, but the bridge (not yet in this clip) gets extremely acrid and may for some ruin the ambience. I always struggle with whether to include that part, but this evening the spirit of political folk music seemed to infuse me with permission, so I will proceed to record the highly political and not so pretty bridge and post again this weekend.