It’s taking me a lot longer than I’d hoped to set up the studio at the new house. For one thing, several pieces of equipment were damaged in the move - nothing super tragic, but imagine how easy it is to save a new file when you don’t have a working keyboard. More importantly, I’m having trouble sorting out where to put the various elements of my studio setup in the new room. I’m arguing with myself about where exactly to place synths versus guitar stands and the end result is that I haven’t really gotten anything done.
But, somehow, I managed to write an ending to the Mandelirium fractal zoom. The earlier zoom was zo large und zo complexz that it hadn’t finished rendering by showtime. So I faded out the soundtrack accordingly. Now, however, the zoom is complete with an ending, so I had the daunting task of assembling a suitable conclusion… all while my studio is in utter disarray.
Anyway, perched atop a pile of tangled cables, instruments scattered on the floor around me, I pieced together an ending that, I think, fits pretty well. For the keen-eared, there are also a few subtle but significant changes in the earlier bits of the song. It goes live tonight, and I’ve lost count of how many sold-out shows that makes in a row, but it’s something in the high seventies, I think. The Fractal Foundation rocks!
This is the end, unless you’re thinking about things in a circular way. I’ll post the mastered versions of the songs when they’re ready, and soon after that I’ll have the actual finished disc in hand. Look for them soon!
A Limited Opening
Like Bloom before it, Fade evolved dramatically from the initial idea to the final piece. First I scored a quick sketch in a classical vein and brought over my friend Nando, a talented guitarist and songwriter in his own right, to lay down the first cello part. An interesting accident happened then, as Nando played a take half as fast as before. I slapped it on top of the other, faster one, and all of a sudden we had Cut 1, an unintentional cello jam over a throwaway drum track: Download Free!
A Radical Departure
We never got around to recording the rest of the classical piece. It took a few cuts to figure out, but the song was pulling me in an altogether unexpected direction. I know enough by now to listen when it talks to me, and I ended up with a spacey groove that, to my ear, still described the inevitable descent I was aiming for. Cut 10: Download Free!
The Structure Develops
I started thinking about the journey of the death, and came to understand that my song also must be a journey. And journeys have many phases, so my song must have several parts. This is Cut 30, and you can recognize the final cut to come: Download Free!
Collaboration and Conclusion
It’s often hard to understand when a song is done, particularly when you’re laboring over it for a long time. But when my friend Meghann opened up her beautiful voice and laid down the vocal track, I knew there was nothing left to record. The polishing up happened with the help of my old friend Jesse (Happy Birthday, man!), who came up with about a dozen amazing ideas to make things better. It was Jesse who restrained my omnipresent guitar noodling, Jesse who brought the cello in and out throughout the piece, and Jesse who extended the very last note till its proper length.
Looking back, I find it very fitting that I played Seed, Sprout, and Grow alone, but Bloom and Fade got done only in collaboration with friends. Once more, this is Cut42, the final cut of Fade, fifth and penultimate song in the album: Download Free!
How do you write a song about death? Should it be grandiose and terrifying like a requiem, or quiet and dreamy like a child’s wind-up music box? How do you weave into it the inexorable pull, the undertow which pulls you out away from land into the unknown? We’ve all been through birth, and so there must be some part of us that remembers. But who among us can say what it is like to die?
Rough Ideas - Cut 10
Part A [to 1:50]… Bloom went through a pretty large number of variations before I settled on something I like. As I mentioned before, I started off with a simple 3-part picture, but it took me nearly a dozen tries to get a coherent idea in place. In this cut, you hear pretty much the same things as in the final version, only much rawer and emptier.
Part B [to 2:49]… This was a lot of fun for me to put together, as it involved congas under a smooth, sexy, bass-driven melody. Part B essentially stayed the same from here till the final cut, although I redid many of the performances.
Part C… Finally, Part C of this cut is merely a sketch. It only took one listen to understand that this part wasn’t going anywhere, because - besides other obvious problems - it just didn’t fit thematically with what I was trying to say. So I killed it, but include it here because it’s so different from the end result. This is Cut 10, very raw: Download Free
Roughly Improved - Cut 21 Part A [to 1:50]… Many days and a lot of difficult hours later I came up with several improvements. First off I noodled around over Part A with, yes, two guitar solos. One heavily distorted, the other clean and reverb-ey. They fight for your attention, but there are bits I liked, so I used their DNA in writing my solo for the opening half of Part A. But I was quickly running out of ideas and glad to trade off with Alexis Harte, who I think handled things much better than I could’ve.
Part B [to 2:50]… There are melody lines here that I think are quite valuable. I sort of wish that I could have fit them somehow into the final cut, but once I heard what Alexis was doing in Part B (which ended up in the final cut), I figured there was just no going back. On the other hand, one of the pleasures of this site is in allowing me to put out stuff that didn’t make the cut.
Part C… Even though I tossed the heavy synth line from Part A, I was still stuck in the idea of a third part. Originally I planned a long crescendo of overdubbed guitars, and this is my first experiment in that direction. But again, it rapidly grew clear to me that this part was still going nowhere. This is Cut 21: Download Free
Recognizing Completion - Cut 33 Sometimes you find yourself hacking and hacking away at a thing, and nothing you do makes it any better. So, after a stupid number of takes, I threw out Part C for good. By this time I was feeling pretty discouraged, but then Alexis came back with his amazing solos. It fit perfectly, since I had given everything I had to record my solo in the first half of Part A (up to 0:45), and anything after that I did wasn’t so interesting to me.
I liked his playing so much that I laid down extra time in Part B and asked him for more, so he came over one afternoon and very quickly we recorded a lot of great stuff. What’s most fitting, I think, about Alexis’ Part B is how the new bits became sort of the missing Part C to the song. At least it came close enough to satisfy that part of my ear that really wanted some sort of denouement after the unabashed sexiness of Part B. So here again is the final cut, Cut 33 of the fourth song in the album, Bloom: Download Free
