Almost exactly 24 hours ago I was laying in bed drifting off to sleep when the phrase “don’t look down when you go” came to my mind. It came with a visual image of someone getting ready to die. While it was referring to death, the vision and phrases were very hopeful. It was like, “don’t be afraid to leave this all behind”. There was a definite contrast between the somber images of a pending funeral for those that would be left behind with the hope and release of the person leaving this earth. There were more words and phrases that came, but I don’t remember them. Or maybe I ended up subconsciously including them in the finished product, I don’t know. Anyway, I woke up this morning and grabbed my guitar. Almost instantly I had a chorus and a couple stanzas of verse. I had been wanting to write a song like No One Hurts Up Here or When We’re Gone, Long Gone. Very slow and some of the phrases repeated.
By around lunchtime I had the song pretty well set. I recorded it with guitar and vocals. Then I added mandolin and a rope tensioned bass drum track which really elevated the song. After listening to it a few times, I thought the arrangement was perfect, but the lyrics needed a bit of refinement. I ended up doing two stanzas for verses one and two, but only one for verse three. I took out the original verse three and moved one of the stanzas from verse two and then wrote another one for verse two. Seemed much better. Lesson to songwriters: As much as possible, write more verses than you will need in the finished product. This way you can choose the best verses or phrases. Works for me, at least.
After running around a bit tonight, I re-visited the original recording and decided to re-record the demo using the new lyrics. After doing the guitar and vocals, I added the mando and bass drum again. The arrangement seemed to want something else, so I grabbed the accordion(!) to see if that would fit. PERFECT! I did about three or four takes to learn the part and kept the last one. After recording a couple different endings on accordion, it was DONE!
Now, here it is almost 1am. Almost exactly 24 hours since the phrase came to me last night. The song was written, arranged and recorded in that amount of time. Amazing. Now all that’s left is to play it for Rochelle to see what she thinks. I feel like it will be a great Potter’s Field song. Either way, I’d like to have her do some backing vocals on it soon. Hopefully once that’s done we can put it up on our website as a demo. The live arrangement will be more of a challenge in the duo format. Probably me playing acoustic guitar and kick drum while Ro plays mando or accordion.
Ok, off to bed. Maybe to be given another phrase or two…
Lyrics, mp3, etc., to come…
John
May 21, 2010
As an architect, I live for these kind of days (and nights). All my best design work has always been inspired by music playing in the background (or in my head.) Wonderful story about a wonderful piece of music. Maybe someday I’ll design something with one of your songs playing in the background (or in my head.)