Behind the Scenes #13 - Twist It
LINK: DOWNLOAD ‘TWIST IT’
I know it has a silly title, like it’s a redux of some stupid dance craze. Believe you me, if I could write a dance craze song, for the money, I would.
Its genesis is far more mundane and familiar - though I guess it’s a little odd writing its behind the scenes entry at the stroke of midnight as Valentine’s Day begins!
Tariqa and I met a long time ago. Without her approval this perhaps isn’t the best place to expand on it too much, but simply put after an initial Ross and Rachel will they/won’t they, it never happened. Except we got through it in the same number of months the Friends cast took years to pull off.
I then wrote a shitload of songs about it. Twist It included. I guess Ross would have done the same, with results worse than mine.
Queue a Lost-style FlashForward (woah, meta), it’s 2008 and we’ve been together for a few years. Twist It is one of the 30 songs I recorded for Battletech, and was always meant to go on the mythical ’second disc’ of acoustic-style songs, but got bumped up to main-disc status, ’cause it’s a good song. With the epic treatment I gave it, it had to go at the end, but I always planned a quiet acoustic number to follow it a la Abbey Road, otherwise yes, it would have been the album’s end.
But why? Well, from the reviews I’ve read, no matter how kind, I have a suspicion none of them heard the song to its end - the big electro-bass, heavy dance thingamajig. At the time I felt the second Radio Over Moscow album would kick off where Twist It left off, heading further in that direction. In some ways, due to my wrist injury, it has - the new record is far more electronic and computer based, thought still throws in enough guitar - but in others, I’ve ditched the “live” sound it had and adopted something a bit more direct.
Alright, this entry is turning into custard. I’m avoiding the point. The point is, I was pissed off and young. What I was ranting about in the song, came right enough for the subject to marry me. Though at one point, I remember considering changing the lyric ‘August 11′ to ‘September 11′ - did I mention the song’s plot (and reality) is set in late 2001?
I’d recorded a few demos of Twist It over the years, and the outro sequence is based on one I estimate - from the shitty gear I’m guessing was being used, from the sound quality - was done in 2002. The coda synth melody was present on a delay-heavy guitar, probably before I was able to program a keyboard melody (to be honest, and to lamely brag, I actually played the Battletech version’s keyboard live).
The bassline melody was there from the beginning, being the first thing added after the basic track. On the recording there’s a an octave-higher clone to make it stand out when it does the run towards the end of each verse.
The heavy guitars and extra garnishing never really worked on the choruses, so I kept it out and just layered up the vocal for balance.
The bridge between the two halves of the song, I never really figured out what to put in there - different demos and mixes of early versions had a mix of spoken word, shit taken from movies, loud guitars, shitty piano, palm-muted metal riffs… I tried it all.
I gave up and went with what you hear on the record. I managed to get a synth to fill in the gaps.
‘Oh, didn’t you know?’ is, in context, either the most naive or facetious/sarcastic lyric on the whole album.
LINK: DOWNLOAD ‘TWIST IT’
Tags: battletech, behind the scenes, recording
