Stealing into the music room at school

  I was told I could use the music room whenever I wanted, including the glockenspiels and miscellaneous other things in there, whenever I wanted.  (I just typed glockenspiels and miscellaneous without getting corrected by spell check, and am feeling pretty sassy about that, though "sassy" isn't itself part of the British spell check I'm using, apparently, as it's underlined in red both times I've typed it.)

   I often write simple, simply songs that are supposed to be slow and sad.  In folk music, and even in country music, people get this.  Often though, unless a slow, sad song really reaches out and grabs people by their weepers (I can make up any words I want), they are going to say "That song is boring" or "That song has no groove" (which is rather like saying "That song has no point, no reason to be).  So, I fight that.  I take songs that are sad and quiet and long and try to make them have some depth and drama, some sturm und drang to them. 

  I wrote "The Romantic Song" in 1992 and played it for a friend of mine.  It was about repeatedly realizing that this girl or that girl, whom one had pined over for months that seemed, to an adolescent mentality, to have been lifetimes, simply wasn't that into me.  He said it was good, but that playing a song for a dude to hear was kinda gay.  I agreed and few people heard it again.  It's not a crowd-pleasing song to whip out at open stages or anything either.

 For some reason I kinda envisioned it as a kind of slow, torch song, a jazz song that makes one weep.  I am not Jessica Rabbit (though Mindy can sing like her and would sing like Jessica Rabbit into my microphone if I asked her to, OR talk like Lisa Simpson) but I had this idea.  I wanted it to be a slow, beautiful piano thing, but don't really play much piano.  I asked a pianist to play it when I was recording it in the studio.  I asked him to play piano like in a Meat Loaf song and he kinda refused, after mocking how Roy Bittan of the E Street Band tends to play songs on Meat Loaf albums.  Then the piano part got lost somehow.  And I had this song with loud guitar that swirled like sludge, and didn't quite work.  Saxophone was considered but not really done.  A five string bass part was played by an unimpressed and inebriated bass player.  I liked the low end that this gave.  

  Then, one night in my car, I played some of songs for Mindy (whose almost-completed tattoo is pictured in the above photo), who I was driving home after she'd sang for me.  She objected to "The Romantic Song" in terms of things she'd forgiven in the others.  This was the song she felt had no groove, and wasn't going anywhere.  It is supposed to be a "interlude between two other songs, changing the mood up from what they do" kind of thing, and a kind of "bringing the mood right down here" experience.

  So one evening, I sat on the futon with an acoustic guitar, and simply recorded it simply.  I wanted to do it "all simple" like Rick Rubin recording Johnny Cash shortly before his death.  I heard "God's Gonna Cut You Down" and likes the scrapy drum loop.  I turned a drum loop backwards to get a scrapy sound to the snare, and sang and played the guitar all in one go, without redoing either part, or doubling them or anything.  Then I hid two harmony vocals, some quiet orchestral string pads and a bass guitar in there. I liked it.

  It was simple and good.  Then I took some pre-recorded timpani (kettle drums, the "Theme from 2001:A Space Odyssey" ones) and put them in to add some solemnity and drama.  I was surprised to find that timpani are tunable because you can play wrong notes on them, given what the song is.  I had some trouble finding properly pitched pre-recorded timpani, and decided I could use the ones in the music room at school. I also put Sad Trombone from sadtrombone.com at the beginning to make it a little more tongue in cheek.

  Now, it is summer, and the music teacher has retired.  I went in to the darkened, air conditioned room this morning before lunch, and indulged myself.  I decided to forswear the timpani entirely and use a monster, giant marching band bass drum.  Not the regular one with the school logo and mascot picture on it that we use.  The one that's too big and too heavy.  That one.  Then I got a gong and played it in there a bit.  And then I tried something I've REALLY always wanted to do: I stuck my two SM57 microphones (not even using mic stands) under the lid of the piano, one at each end, and played crashy left hand octave chords really hard at strategic places in the song, in the manner of how the piano is done on some of the Johnny Cash stuff (like "I Hung My Head").  Then I went home, walking right by the xylophone, glockenspiel, tubular bells, vibroslap, and other blandishments.

  At home, I messed with it. I messed with it and messed with it, concluding that the really dead strings that had been on my acoustic when I recorded the simple bed track sounded thin (i.e. like crap).  I really didn't want to redo that base track, so I decided to add supplementary acoustic guitar.   I plugged the acoustic into my rotating Leslie speaker cabinet.  It sounded kinda processed, kinda chorussy and 80s, but I did it anyway.  Not sure about it.  Here is what I have, though.