Turning Black

"Turning Black" is one of my oldest songs.  Today, after talking to a hot girl at the bank where she works, I imported the song into Pro Tools and did some stuff with it.  For instance, I took that already recorded "pipe organ" keyboard track I had played, and ran it through my Leslie rotating speaker cabinet.  The Leslie played the organ track without the rest of the song, while spinning, and I put two mics on it and recorded what that sounded like.  It made the organ sound all stereo and swirly.

Then I took a single smack of the giant monster bass drum from the music room that I had recorded for "The Romantic Song," and cut and pasted it throughout to make Chris Metcalfe's drums sound enormous.  I even used it to make "gunshots" to echo a line about "razor blades, knives and a gun in my hand."  I took the closest thing I had to a gun (a Han Solo blaster made from a replica Mauser pistol) and used it to record a cocking gun noise.  I turned up the voices of people I haven't seen for ten years, singing in the background.  One would no longer speak to me now if I met him, and the other would, but I have no idea where he lives.  Still, they're singing harmony vocals on my song.  I fought it sounding like mud/mush/crap, and was partly successful.  People always say this song sounds like Pink Floyd.  I'm shooting for a more upset sounding, aggressive piece than Pink Floyd, but I love Pink Floyd, so shouldn't be too upset to have it compared to them, I guess, though it makes me feel like I've just imitated, rather than created.  The fact is, though, that I was thinking of Bruce Springsteen's "The River" when I wrote it.  I can still hear that in the movement of the chorus a bit.  The verse owes more (in terms of me listening to songs that had verses with just two chords repeating) to The Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want." 

This song shows pretty clearly that I was very unhappy at school and even more unhappy at church youth group, but didn't have the musical vocabulary to really talk about that, so made what is kind of a "heavy as lead, growly" country song.

Joel's caption for the scanned bag of Star Wars toys was characteristically funny and inappropriate (Joel specializes in "funny due to being unexpectedly inappropriate): He said "A Star Wars Auschwitz."