I thought I’d throw out some mp3 samples of how song#2 has progressed. The whole thing started as a strummy little bit that I (Gary) had. In fact, the way I was remembering the song was to call it “strummy.”
“Strummy”
I wrote some lyrics at this tempo and called it “My Pitiful Words.” But, James thought the song would work better as a more uptempo number and did a quick demo so I could hear what he meant.
“My Pitiful Words – faster”
I took that and did some new tracking. (see brief guitar video below). Here’s where the track stands prior to vocals and flourishes being added. James worked his production magic and quickly gave me this version back:
“My Pitiful Words – fleshed out”
We’re rewriting the lyrics, because until James brought it to my attention, I had no idea that “My Pitiful Words” was a phrase that had religious connotations. So, once we’re done, the song will change titles at that time (same thing happened with our first track, which was originally called Wanted to Fly and became Touch The Sky). We should be able to release the new track relatively soon, once vocals are tracked and final edits/flourishes are made.
As promised, below is a link to download Touch The Sky, the first song recorded in the sessions for our third album. We finished mixing the song on Friday and 3 days later it’s yours to keep. Let us know what you think!
Touch the Sky
here’s some video footage taken last week when I added some overdubs to Touch The Sky. the song is now complete and we’ll be releasing it right here on the blog tomorrow!
Let’s get the ball rolling with the first song of this new record – Touch The Sky. The guitar riff at the beginning of the song dates back a few years – I remember playing it in some of the final rehearsals with the Jeunes in 2005 – but I struggled to build a song around it so left it on the shelf. Then in November 2007 when we were getting ready to record Sunny Days Ahead, I made a very rough demo with the working title Wanted To Fly, but we already had around 20 songs more developed than that one, so again it stayed on the shelf .
Wanted To Fly (2007 demo)
It’s kind of embarrassing for me to listen to that demo now – I only had one line of lyrics (the first line) and the rest was improvised stream-of-consciousness stuff just to see if any other good lyrics came to me (they didn’t), so it’s pretty out of tune and pretty obvious I’m not quite sure what I’m doing yet. But sharing this sort of stuff is what this new blog is all about 
Fast forward to March 2009 and collaborating on the song with SSA! bassist/songwriter/guitarist extraordinaire Gary Miller. We liked the verse from the original demo but weren’t sure about the rest – it didn’t seem to fit very well. Gary had some chords and a melody that worked really well for the bridge (the “I held my tongue” bit) and then last week he recorded a really cool bass line. It’s been through several revisions since then – but finally I recorded some new lyrics and guitars a couple of days ago. Phew! So here’s where we are right now:
Touch The Sky (2009 work-in-progress)
It’s not finished yet but we think it’s starting to get close. Got any comments or ideas? Just add a comment below or shoot us an email.
We also have some video footage of each of us working on this song which we’ll post in the next few days.
All going well, we should be able to finish it off and release it to you as a free download within a week or so.
Welcome to our new blog. We’re about to start recording our third album and this time we’re going to do things a little differently. We’re going to invite you into the studio with us so you can see and hear what we’re up to from day one. We’ll be posting videos, photos and rough mixes so you’ll see and hear our progress as it happens.
We’ll also be working a little differently. Instead of working on a bunch of songs at once, we’ll be working on one at a time until the song is finished. As soon as it’s mixed we’ll post it online as a free download. Then we’ll start working on the next song. Eventually we’ll shortlist the best dozen songs and release it as our next record.
Along the way we’ll be asking for your feedback and ideas and we’ll incorporate as many of those into the record as we can. Instead of locking you out of the process until it’s over, we’re inviting you to be part of it. We hope you enjoy the ride!
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