Sunday 18 January 2009

Gettin' Music Done

Many years ago, I wrote a song about liking girls who didn't know I existed.  It had a Jim Steinman (Meat Loaf) inspired bit where a female voice joins and the male and female voices sing a small almost-conversation.  When I came to do it in the studio, Mindy, a shy little 18 year old, sat crosslegged on the floor with the lights off and sang a cool little wobbly vocal for it.  I worked and worked on the song, importing it to my hard drive several years after that studio went out of business and it had been gathering dust a while in my closet.  I made it heavier and heavier, until I was deeply pleased with it, and then my friend Nathan said "That sounds exactly like Guns N Roses doing Knockin on Heaven's Door."  And it had gotten so it did.

I started rebuilding the song around the existing drums, bass and vocals, and made many different versions.  Eventually, I started from scratch, resigning myself to losing Mindy's call and answer vocal during the quiet bit.  I then started asking other girls to do it and one by one, rather like in the song, they said "Sure!  Cool!" and then didn't.

Eventually, despite having last heard that Mindy was living in Montreal, I looked her up on FaceBook and, not only was she back in town, she was longing to get back into doing music.  Today she came over to do the female vocal part on the completely re-tooled, completely unGuns N Roses, completely unKnockin' on Heaven's Door version, which actually has a different pacing and rhythm and so on.  This version had been intended to sound Motown, and I'd built the rhythm section with this in mind, but as soon as I started adding acoustic and electric guitars, and I sang it, all the Motown went out of it immediately.  Then I got J to come over and do electric.  I let him play with my digital delay pedal, as he'd not tried one much.  He thought he was sounding like Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead, but in that song, he was sounding very Bryan Potvin of The Northern Pikes.  Then Tyler dropped in during his Christmas break from school in Toronto and did me a lovely piano bit.  Now it remained to add Mindy to it.

She was having trouble getting the part together, so I recommended doing some easy "doo doo's" and "oo oo's" for the outro at the end of the song.  We got overly analytical of that, but got some good stuff going.  I was trying to help her get more relaxed, as she has a gift for fluid, wandery, soulful stuff that evokes Billie Holliday, Amy Winehouse, Ella Fitzgerald, Joni Mitchell and the like.  It wasn't happening, and I mentioned the Motown roots of the song, and she said "I totally can't hear that."  So I turned off all the parts except the drums and bass.  

She got very excited and said "That's totally Motown!  Could you record me a track of me freestyling to that with some lyrics I've had kicking around for a while?"  I said fine, and she sang some very soulful, groovy vocals that were going all over place in a good way.  I had a suspicion, and said "Can you do a second take of that, and secretly started the recording at the outro part of the "almost all tracks muted so she can make up her own song" piece.  She did it again, and then I did something cool: I turned the rest of my song back on around her little freestyle song she'd just done, and let it function as backing vocals while my voice and the rest of my song played in unison with her song.  And it worked.  Of course she was on beat because we'd been using the same drums, but she'd also been making up stuff to my bass playing, so her stuff fit mine rhythmicly, and also followed the chord changes with the bass.  Very odd.  Very cool.

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