Sunday afternoon, 3:30pm. I went to the studio to hear Ryan's finished "Lie Next to Me" mix. This song is a 100% vocal song, done "a capella" style. It doesn't sound like any of the other songs and if it goes on the record, I can only hear it working as the last track, to close out the record. Here's how LN2M came in to being:

I had been in the studio about six weeks, and all my lead & harmony vocals and guitars were done. I had spent about a month alone with Ryan in the studio and we had just added some atmospheric keyboard parts to "Outsider", "Bloody Mary" and "She Won't Last". Once that was complete, I found myself in a unique position. Dave was still a few days from starting up his guitar tracks, and I had completed all of my work, and had some fun experimentation time. I was in this great recording studio, with an uber-talented recorder, and had time on my hands. I'd never been in a situation where there wasn't a long list of things to get done, and a time line that I was up against. I could have taken a couple days off and kicked it at home, but what fun is that?

The last song I had written on the acoustic was called "Lie Next to Me".  I liked the idea of having an acoustic track on the record somewhere. I tracked the guitar to a song called "Someone Else" back in the Henson sessions, but never finished recording it. At the start of the Abraham sessions, I demoed out a song called "Green" as well. I like both songs, but neither was really urging me to put it in the running to be on the record.

Ryan and I spent a lot of time talking about our favorite music, and I played him Brian Wilson's "Smile" which I was listening to a lot during vocal tracking. He had never heard it. "Smile" is largely a sung record, and features layer upon layer of exquisitely arranged vocal tracks - it's an amazing album.

One night in the week before Dave was scheduled to come in to do guitars, I stayed up late and made a home demo of LN2M, as an all vocal or "a capella" track. Initially I had no idea how to go about it. Since arranging vocals on the level of "Smile" made my brain hurt, I started out simply. Why not take an acoustic song, and just have one vocal track per string of the guitar? So there would be six backing tracks, one for each guitar string, and the voice would just sing what the notes in the guitar chords were doing. Seemed like a good enough place to start.

It took me about 3 hours, and once I was finished, it sounded much better that I had thought it would have. I was pretty happy with it as a demo, and it was definitely good enough to bring in to Ryan and Josh to see what they thought. My demo seemed to go over pretty well with them, so Ryan and I reserved that Saturday's tracking solely for LN2M.

On Friday I started feeling a little sick, and by the time Saturday came around I was under the weather and coughing up green shit. Good times. Nice visual, right? You're welcome. Dave was coming in on Monday, and we were off on Sundays, so it was Saturday or nothing.

We ended up duplicating  the approach I had taken with my demo; one track for each guitar string. We made a double track for each of those, and that made a nice studio-quality duplicate of what I'd done at home. We then added a few more tracks for some spice: a couple answering counter melodies in the chorus and outro, and we were done.

Yesterday, in the mixing session, Ryan and I went through and gave the song some more shape, by muting some of the higher voices at the beginning of the song, and slowly sculpting how they layer back in until the 2nd verse when they all play together. I love how this song turned out. Again, I don't know if it will make the record, but I would like to see that happen. This song would really help accomplish one of the things we have tried to do with this record: to make something that rocks, but also travels through many melodic peaks and valleys in the course of the album's journey.

I left Ryan to work on "Why Cry". He wanted to make his version of this song in what was left of the day's session.

space
seems like it's organized
against me