Writing and Working
The band ended up spending most of March on hiatus. External demands, such as weddings, code, wiring, broken windshields, and broken water pipes have forced us to spend our normal practice time focusing on other issues. However, we have tried to keep our Thursday night writing/recording sessions going through it all.
On the 7th of February, André, Dave and I went into the studio to play freeform and jam. See what comes out. Dave played a couple of old unfinished songs of his that André and I had heard for the first time.
Normally after we practice or record, I take a copy of the work and drop it into my iTunes, slap it into my iPod and then spend the weeks listening to the work over and over to see what the hell is wrong or to write with. In the case of Dave’s two songs, I was fixated with a song called “Faded White”. I would play it over and over. Keep in mind that the recorded track that I had was only Dave’s guitar, my bass and André’s drums. There were no vocals and Dave didn’t sing any during the session.
After about 6 weeks of listening to the song, I asked Dave if it would be alright for me to try to take a stab at writing some words for his song. He graciously said that he didn’t mind and that he has some half-finished words for it already. The plan was that I would write what I was hearing in my head, play it for Dave and then he would play what he originally wrote and then let him figure out what he wants to do with all of the material.
I figured that it would be a good exercise for myself to take someone else’s song and title and with nothing else, try to paint a (hopefully) catchy melody and lyrics on top of it. I thought I could do it, but wasn’t able to commit the time needed to write until Monday night.
I spent all evening writing while André made 5 gallons of a German Alt Bier in the kitchen (along with playing drums in Socialized and the Slick Johnson Snowman Expedition, André is also a damn fine brewer). The next night (last night) I quickly double-tracked some vocals of questionable pitch on top of the original recording. At midnight last night I sent it off to Dave and let the chips fall where they may.
As of right now, I’m happy with the chorus melodies and some of the words in the choruses. However, I am disappointed in the verses and not that thrilled by either of the two vocal melodies that I wrote for the verses. I went into this experiment convinced that I was going to hit one out of the park. That I was going to write the best words that I’ve ever written. I discovered that I wrote something that’s OK and considerably short of ‘out of the park’. Disappointing, but illustrative.
On March 20th, Dave, André and I were in the studio and were doing another freeform jam. We wanted to stumble onto something that could be working into a song. We jammed for about 2.5 hours with absolutely nothing coming out of it and I for one was frustrated. I instinctively felt that there was a song dying to come out, but we were playing shit.
Suddenly, Dave started playing a riff that triggered something in us. We started shaping it and a melody started to arise. Dave quickly grabbed a mic and we all hummed the melody into the mic. That was the end of the session.
Last week, the 27th, we went back in to the studio and Dave chopped up all of the relevant parts to the song. André then worked with the different parts and arranged the song properly. After that, we all recorded new parts following André’s arrangement. Bing! We had something.
André is working on words and we plan to go back into the studio on Thursday to demo out, hopefully, a brand new song.
All of our songs get working titles until the words are written and this one is no different. We’ve dubbed the instrumental track ‘Milkshake’.