I should really do the ‘Hide the Decline’ story-behind-the-song entries too.
But anyway, this entry is keep you updated on what’s going on with this new stuff I’m working on - the ‘Deus Ex Robotica’ album. Well, it’s going pretty frakkin’ well. I know I told myself it would take two years, and a part of me still thinks that’ll happen, but I’ve had such fast, excellent progress to date, it could very well be done by the end of the year. It’s that kind of thinking that will ensure it will actually take two years.
I’ve worked on a bunch of songs - mostly ones that were on the old luna spark version of the album, but a few new ones, since it’s gonna be a double album and all. The new ones include Basically Slaves, which if you follow me on Twitter is the one I was saying sounds like a cross between Weezer, Gary Numan, Nine Inch Nails and Led Zeppelin; and The Saviour, which wasn’t coming together till I took out its bass and guitars, and made it sound like Devo.
I’m thinking I’ll release the album one song a month too - that way, my impatient side is satisfied, and I can spend more time on the later stuff. And I can write a serial novella or something. I know that’s a good idea - well, maybe not if I wrote it myself - but whether it’ll happen, who knows.
I guess releasing the album a song at a time means I’ll be able to justify emailing my mailing list 25 times instead of once, haha! It’s a no-brainer this stuff is by far and away the best-produced stuff I’ve ever done. ‘Battletech’ was me jumping up a level, ‘Hide the Decline’ was experimenting at that level a bit, and now this is the real deal. Remains to be seen what happens when the vocals - always the hardest part - are in.
Anyway… if you haven’t already, check out the Circle Jerk 2010 EP of covers. Free download!
Posted 1 month, 1 week ago at 4:28 am. Add a comment
No, it’s not the title of a song. I was planning on recording the vocals to this Hamilton covers EP, but instead found some new software was ready for me to have a play with… and being a guy, the urge to fuck around with shiny new things was too strong, and planned ‘work’ was put on the backburner till tomorrow.
Will finish the EP tomorrow if it’s not raining!
I won an iPod Nano at work yesterday, and I wasn’t even there. We hit some target, and we all went into a draw, and I got lucky. Apparently they shoot video now, which is awesome. My current iPod, an 80GB Classic, isn’t on speaking terms with my desktop. The computer freezes up when I plug it in, then when I unplug it, it’s all, ‘Oh! You want to access the iPod? Nah, it’s busted.’ But it works fine with the laptop, but all the music is on the desktop.
So a Nano could be very handy. I see some odd stuff on my walks to work some days, so a camera could come in handy too. Never been keen on cellphone cameras, as they always make it so hard to get anything from the camera to the computer.
Much like my old iPod.
In other news, I went to update my weight loss chart this morning, and found I’ve fallen off the bottom of it. That’s a good thing, I guess?
This is pretty nerdy, and I dunno how long I’ll keep it up, but I’ve decided (on a whim) to keep a record of what I’m recording/writing each day, ’cause it’s the kind of thing I’m bound to find interesting in future times. How interesting it is to anyone in the present, fuck knows! I’m always finding old recordings and songs and am often disappointed to not remember the context they were recorded or written in.
I’m still going to do the Behind the Scenes entries for the Hide the Decline songs, since they’re still fresh in the memory for the most part, but consider this pre-done entries for the next EP or album or whatever I end up doing. Might even post rough MP3s… we’ll see.
Anyway. Today I worked on a recording for a proposed interim, ‘rock’ sounding EP I wanna get out of my system before I venture down the rabbit hole of recording my double album, provisionally titled ‘Deus Ex Robotica’. Okay, that might change.
So, this song is either called ‘Flashes Before Your Eyes’ or ‘Collider Stop’. The second title is perhaps more original, but there’s a chance a song called ‘Stop’ could also make the EP, so we’ll go with ‘Flashes…’ for now.
It was one of the first songs written in my current burst, which is proving rather fruitful. Haven’t had one of these bursts in a couple of years!
Anyway, it’s a stop-start kind of thing, with a simple two-chord riff in the verses, a big chunky riff heading into the chorus, which has a simple chord progression punctuated by distorted guitars on minor seventh chords, ending with a powerchord run down the fretboard, back to where it began.
I spent ages trying to get the instrument arrangement right - tried acoustic guitar for the basic riff, ditched it for a synthbass, back to acoustic guitar, switched to electric guitar like the demo, then eventually settled on acoustic guitar, because it kept the song pinned to the ground where it needed to be in the verses, and also it felt funkier locking in with the quiet drum machine parts than the other options.
The electric guitars were much easier - I’ve got this nice fuzz sound I’ve programmed into my Boss digital studio, it works well with both ‘live’ and synthetic drums, which I’ve always found difficult to pull off. It also has the advantage of covering up my limited technique, which is even more limited these days with my bung wrist.
My wife works for a magazine distributor, and sometimes brings home goodies - last week it was a MusicTech magazine DVD with all these synth string samples, a lot of which sound like they’re straight off the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange. Grabbed a couple of those to fill out the middle 8. Speaking of the middle 8, it wasn’t a part of the song that came naturally - when I wrote the song in March, I needed something that started on D, and went through all these old unfinished songs I’d scanned into my computer. Came across this simple, catchy piece from circa 2001 that was in a slightly different feel, but it slotted in nicely once the melodic bassline was added. It’s not often my middle 8 sections are where the song breathes and coasts along nicely - normally I use them to amp things up, or go off on a tangent - but ‘Flashes…’ has intense bursts on a regular basis, so yeah.
The main synth lines were recorded in two parts, in completely different ways - some of it was pre-programmed so I could use it as a sonic guide while recording the guitars and bass, and the rest played live. Ironically enough, the easy parts were programmed and the harder parts played live. I do things backwards more often than I should, really.
I’m going for a less electronic sound with these recordings, more live and rocking - so getting a good, punchy and dynamic drum sound is key. I’ve got a few settings I’ve discovered work well with the kit I’m using, a bit of convolution reverb here and tube-modelled compressor there, not being afraid to radically tweak the EQ or the amplitude. Of course, I’m still chucking in little electro beats in the quiet parts, booming snares on the second beats, as I do. Part of my sound and all, I guess.
Lyrically, not really sure what it’s about. A bit of Lost there, techno-paranoia there, we’ll see when it’s done, eh? It’s not going to be the deepest song in the world - just a quick, unpredictable and unpretentious (despite the blog entry…) indie rock song to ease my way into recording this EP. I’ve got better songs lined up, but wanted to start with one I wasn’t too sure about, kind of like a practise. I still wasn’t sure about it right up until I had everything loaded up and started mixing - and it all fell into place pretty quickly. At least to my ears after seven hours of recording it!
And all this before work! Couldn’t get back to sleep once Parker was in bed, and I didn’t start work till 4pm… Energy drinks are my friends, but in an hour or so when I’m trying to sleep, they won’t be. Flashes before my eyes’ indeed…
Enough. Here’s a demo of the song, which was recorded back in March.
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’skeyboard 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.
I had a burst of songwriting in mid-2005 after we’d moved up to Auckland, and this song largely was a product of those ’sessions’. The exact circumstances escape me, but from memory - some of these ‘facts’ will be more verifiable than others - I had most Mondays and Tuesdays pretty much to myself, and composed a few pieces that would/will surface in various forms over the years.
My favourite of those times, ‘Mondays Are The Best Days’, is still unfinished. Probably until I get another job where Monday justifies its awesomeness. The ball is in your court, Monday.
This one, I think had its origins pre-the move from Hamilton to Auckland earlier that year, but wracking my brain, I can’t work it out. Musically, it slots into that era… but by the time recording came around, sure, it was one of 30 songs laid down, and it almost didn’t make the cut. I thought, probably wrongly, I dunno, it should go on. Thing is, there were about three distinct production style/sounds put down in the making of this album - being a potential double, and all - and as much as I love this track as a song, there’s a reason it’s sequenced nearer the end than the start.
Its sound fit in, just. There.
Sometimes, it’s that simple. Thank fuck for Auto-Tune. I removed a lot of the ‘backing vocals’, because the melody I was hoping to invoke was already there, ethereally. Maybe it’s just me, but sometimes in the noise and chaos, you can hear… good stuff. You know, that might not be there initially anyway. I read that’s how Morrissey used to compose melodies whilst in the Smiths - by listening to shit way too loud, then inferring tunes from the harmonics and chaos. Anyway…
There is a small autobiographical part to this song. But it’s an old song, lyrically. Which is kind of why I’m pleased the new album I’m working on, out soon, is not.
In other words, being track #11 on an obscure, nothing album from the middle of nowhere, there you go.
In the same way the last song I wrote about, ‘Capture One’, showed off my Nirvana influence, this one guns for Weezer, with a bit of ‘Lithium’, I guess.
I’d had the chorus lying around for ages, probably since 2003 or ‘04, and something resembling the verses for almost as long. The song didn’t change a whole lot in the recording process, to be honest.
The chorus melody was initially sung in a drawn-out manner, the same notes but harder to sing, basically. I changed it to the shorter, snappier arrangement you hear on the recording largely due to the fact it just didn’t sound good when I sung it the old way, haha. I experimented a bit with a Bowie-esque lower register, but it didn’t really suit the style of the song. You never heard Rivers Cuomo doing that, and probably for good reasons.
The quick harmony bits were added as I was recording - quite basic, but added some extra interest to the melody, since it had been kind of neutered by having its syllables shortened.
The verses were a nightmare to do. The basic melody was always there, but really hard to pull off with my limited vocal skills. I recorded what I thought would be the final take, only to realise it was woefully inadequate. But, there was a silver lining - I did so much post-production and rearranging of the melody, that when it came time to redo it, all I had to do was sing along with the heavily-edited original vocal, and bang, it was almost right on in one take. Layered on some octave above/below vocals, and it sounded good enough.
The arrangement barely changed from the single demo I recorded three or four years ago. The biggest change was in the rhythm guitar, which initially played the intro/verse chords strummed and open, which I couldn’t get to sound any good in the recording. I tried a few things, and opted for the simple two-string motif when there weren’t any vocals, and a basic palm-muted powerchord thing when there were.
The extra drums that come in the second verse were inspired by the incredible tom-work you hear on the first couple of U2 albums. It’s like, there’s this tightly-recorded and crisp snare, kick and hihat combo, then seemingly from another planet these heavily-reverbed and compressed toms blast in, not dissimilar to the ‘Phil Collins sound’, but slightly less processed. I’ve always loved the contrast in sound, so threw it this song, which is otherwise rhythmically, pretty Neanderthal. The switch from guitars and bass in the first half of the second verse to drum machines and synths was an idea I’d used often in my previous musical incarnation as luna spark, but resisted on this album - except for this song. It needed something to justify a longer second verse, and the rising melody didn’t quite cut it, so a change in backing instrumentation I felt helped carry it along.
The middle eight was a nightmare to put together. I’d sung the wrong words on the proper vocal, which were vocally better than the demo, which had the right words. Sounds simple - rerecord the vocal, or just use the demo and fix it up - but the haphazard nature of my recording process means it’s hard to get the exact same vocal sound on a rerecord, and the demo wasn’t quite good enough. I eventually managed to cut between the two, using the original demo vocal for the middle eight, patching it up enough so it sounded the same. Wasn’t easy.
The lyrics, I’m not really sure what they’re about. The bones of the song were written so long ago and never really completed, making it hard to determine what frame of mind I was in when it came. I’m guessing defiant? My own interpretation is I must’ve been called out on something, and I was getting defensive. It happens.
This was one of the songs we practised in the initial ‘live band’ incarnation of Radio Over Moscow. I played the Moog parts on my guitar. Mostly wrongly.
I know this entry was kind of boring. I’m not pissed enough, haha. But the song, as solid as it is, I know isn’t the most interesting or exciting on the album. I personally like it, ’cause it proves to myself I can write a simple, solid guitar-heavy pop song. But it’s kind of boring next to ‘Pakistan’ or ‘The Purpose Of Man’, I know.
I’m often doubted, or at the least, looked at only in sideways glances, when I say Nirvana is one of, if not the, major influence on my songwriting. This album was kind of in response to that, and though somewhat entirely unsuccessful in that regard, the spirit definitely ‘lives on’ in ‘Capture One’.
Well, I’d hope it did anyway, considering it was written with the 100 percent intention of writing a Nirvana song. I know it’s not fashionable to say so, but no one who ever attempts to duplicate another’s style is ever going to do it, and might even succeed in some other way - so why not? I never understood Oasis and Blur detractors who said both bands were ripping off the Beatles. I mean, it’s not as if the Beatles were still around making that kind of music, and if it’s good, who the fuck cares? If Paul McCartney won’t step up, why not let Noel or Damon? And the Beatles didn’t write ‘Girls And Boys’ or ‘Coffee & TV’.
And Nirvana never threw in a time signature change, followed by a Moog solo. So pfffffft.
The song was written in drop-D, on electric guitar. Probably obvious. I remember the afternoon I was recording the vocals, there was some kind of happening in the flats facing ours, at the time. Loads of little kids were running around, and ’cause I couldn’t get a decent vocal sound in the room where most of the album was tracked, I had the mic set up in the lounge, with its wall-sized window, where I also had the blinds open ’cause it was sunny, or something.
Thinking back a year now, I can’t recall why I didn’t just close the blinds, but the kids kept running up to the window whenever I did a take. That, or the parent(s) would halt sipping on their cigarettes for a few seconds while I mumbled through the verses or sheepishly belted out the choruses, probably fearing for my close-to-birthing partner’s sanity.
Being the kind of songwriter now who barely learns his own songs before recording them, a fact that will provide many laughs should I ever try to play live, I had great trouble in the recording/mixing phase when I couldn’t get the lead synthesizer to mesh with the guitars and bass. It wasn’t until I analysed everything closely that I realised I’d confused the order of chords in the riff, and gotten it all completely backwards. If I was in the Beatles, I’d just have recorded it anyway, and gotten George Martin to fix it up.
Unfortunately, as my own producer, recorder, shit-filter and coffee-maker, I was far more bamboozled than science can calculate.
Another song, like the last one, which was originally written a long, long time ago. In the original demo, the lead part - the catchy Moog synth bit, on the album - was played by a lead guitar which sounded like it was tuned by Helen Keller. Okay, something that badly out of tune wouldn’t even be funny, even if it was Helen Keller who twisted the knobs. It was vaguely in key - VAGUELY - so you could tell what notes they were meant to be, but out just enough to make even the worst American Idol contestant double-take.
I’m working on some new material, and in one of the songs, I somehow accidentally programmed the lead Moog part a whole semi-tone low, which if you’re not expecting it, can be a source of much bewilderment, and then, hilarity.
Anyway… I recorded the song initially as a “hmm, maybe”, but it came out well enough for me to chuck it on the album. I mean, it’s barely two minutes long, and with the added little bassline licks and chorus guitar riffs, I thought yeah, it stands up.
It got singled out as a track to skip past in a recent review, but to be honest, I like it. I thought it was catchy enough to stick on the album, and whilst recognising it’s pretty lightweight, it’s over so quickly it doesn’t detract from the record.
And when I decided to try and duplicate the record live myself, armed with a MIDI keyboard and a laptop, its simplicity meant was the first track I went to.
Lyrically, it was/is about a girl I knew very well a long time ago. You could tell that from the opening line, I guess - which I wrote five years after we met, and recorded 15 years after we met… Thing is, we met in the early/mid 1990s as young teens. People change a lot in their teens - which explains the second line. And that’s pretty much it.
Yeah, the lyrics really are as simple as the music, but that’s what you get from a song written by a then 18-year-old who could barely play the guitar. “I had a crush on you, then we changed, and WTF, you’re different! Woah. I should’ve done something then, huh? Even so, it wouldn’t have worked out. That’s pretty much the end of the song, which is good, ’cause no one would want it turning into Twilight: New Moon, would they?”
Sometimes you read that a song had a really long gestation, and then you read Wikipedia only to find out what differentiates a ‘long’ gestation from a short one is the number of hotel rooms and hookers, multiplied exponentially, the guitarist had to pass through in order to come up with the band’s next hit.
In contrast, the main riff to ‘New Electra’ was one of the very first I ever came up with on picking up a guitar. Which was in the mid 1990s. As a reminder, ‘Battletech’ came out in July, this year.
The base of the song was laid down in the late ’90s, early 2000s, and pretty much left to rot. I never brought it up for consideration in any of the bands I was in, and never considered it for recording in my my previous solo iteration, luna spark, which wasn’t as ‘rock’ oriented as ‘Battletech’.
But new technology and such let me try it out, and though it evolved greatly in the mix, I don’t think it could have come out any better. It’s a far cry from what I imagined in 1996 or whatever, but if you knew what lyrics used to hang off the riff, you’d be worshiping the ground Charles Darwin used to listen to music on.
‘Cause really, the whole song is pretty much that riff. And to have some whargarbll over the top of it, with some crappy AutoTune, w0uld just be lame.
The verses aren’t so hot, so AutoTune there is required, for sure.
If you’ve got the album, and it’s a free download, so if you’ve read this far I’m guessing you do, you’d notice the snare sound is different to most of the other songs. It is, yeah. I used a different sample, and to this day, I’m not entirely sure why. It has a more generic session-bad pop sound to it.
The synth sound in the second verse you’d recognise as one I’ve scattered throughout ‘Battletech’, and it’s cropping up a bit in the new recordings I’m working one - perhaps a little too much! I’ve had some troubles with one of my wrists this past year, and combined with the fact I’m now a freakin’ dad (”freakin’ dad” ’cause it’s still a freakout that I’m a freakin’ dad) I’ve not been on the guitar/bass so much.
In its place is that pulsing, so-very-1990s sound. Or ’80s. I”m not sure. Needs more guitar to sound like Rob Zombie, less to sound like Ultravox - the dilemma of my life.
I sometimes go through phases where I try to write songs I could imagine a famous band or artist playing. Normally each artist gets one phase, then I move on - Weezer are an exception. I’ve tried to write a thousand Weezer songs in my life, with varying results.
This was one of the success stories, I feel - even if it ended up sounding nothing like Weezer (much like Weezer themselves, these days).
It began in 2008, I think, making it one of the most recently-penned tracks from ‘Battletech’. It was initially just the power chord verses, with a fairly monotone, wordless melody. The bridge/chorus chords came soon after, but it wasn’t until I recorded it that it really took shape - there was no demo version, what you hear on the album was the first and only attempt at putting it together.
For example, the synth lead that underpins the entire bridge (bit after the verse but before the chorus) was only added as a way of making the bassline melody stand out, and ended up being perhaps the catchiest phrase in the whole song. It also leads nicely into the guitar solo, contributed by R William Murphy - he who helped write ‘The Purpose Of Man’. I told him ‘like van Halen’, which is probably the first and last time I’ll ever ask for something with those words.
The vocals were one of the first I tried using software to do pitch correction, and found by doubling it up with octave higher and lower backing vocals, it gave the song an other-worldy, robotic kind of feel. I utilised the technique to fill in vocals on the other songs, liking what I heard here. Because the verse melody on ‘Fiction’ is quite plain - all the catchiness there being in the chords, really - it helped make the vocals stand out, sound more interesting.
The lyrics are one of my signature mish-mashes of two different ideas; one which came with the chords, and one when I actually sat down to flesh everything out so I could record it. The first idea is that gossip - lies in particular - doesn’t spread by itself. Pretty obvious, really. It takes people to pass it on, and people get a kick out of it - else they wouldn’t do it. In other words, fiction is a lazy bitch, or as the song puts it, Yoda-style, ’such a lazy bitch, fiction is’.
The second angle is basically an attack on the current National Party. They’re always good for a kicking, and last time they were in power I could barely even play the guitar. Still can’t, but hey.
And no, I don’t know why the tom roll going into the second chorus is so quiet. I must have accidentally muted the close mics when I was putting it all together, and by the time I realised something was wrong I couldn’t be arsed remixing it. One mixing error that made the master is still about 5000 less than the Beatles had, per song…
