This is like American Idol, this thread. This forum=Simon Cowell

I will be the first American Idol to write a song about shooting up friends on a Wednesday afternoon...for sure!

cervixFORaHEart wrote:I will be the first American Idol to write a song about shooting up friends on a Wednesday afternoon...for sure!

Oh, for god's sake...I was kidding. Stop with the messages...

I can only assume anyone who loathes me will have learned to simply ignore this thread by now....

A few people have said they really like this song so I wrote this the other day.

Anatomy of "Needles"

1/17/07

Needles

"Diamonds and feelings salting [haunting] the air
Your heart is blistered and Im prepared [pretend]
Up in the valleys, dyed in your hair
Wishing that things could be this way again....
Is this explanation sane?
Im trusting that this explanation is sane...
Eventually my friends are going to take me there...."

Some of my favorite recordings Ive ever made have fell into place exactly the way this track did. When I was a kid I used to think the idea of writing a song was so impossible. I always thought that people recorded what was in their heads. That somehow these "songs" were tangible items long before ever being put on tape or heard by anyone. And Im sure this is the case for most good songwriters. But if I waited around until I heard a song in my head to record I would have a grand total of about three songs on tape in my entire life. I just dont seem to operate that way.

The track "Needles" took about twenty minutes, start to finish. The song is made up of four seperately recorded tracks:

1. Main acoustic guitar - centered
2. Vocals [clean] - right center
3. Vocals [reverb] - left center
4. Slide guitar - far right

The tracks were recorded in that order and with the exception of the reverbed vocals what you hear is first take and improvised. The vocals are mumbled and the "lyrics" run the gamut from random words to utter nonsense sounds. The reverbed vocal track was recorded to try and balance the clean vocals and to give a little symmetry to the slide in the right channel. The finished lyrics shown were only written after the entire song was already recorded. I do that a lot. I really dont like writing lyrics, generally. But I do enjoy getting something on tape that is for the most part completely unintelligible. Then I go back and listen and try and hear what I could be saying. It always makes for much more interesting stuff than if I sit down and look at a piece of paper and try to think of something to say. At least this way Im kind of putting up some boundaries to work with. It helps boil an infinite number of possible words down to a smaller group that somewhat phonetically match what I already have on tape.

I love the way this works out most of the time. The guitar part is out of time, fumbled, in no discernible key and has no real sense of form or pattern to it. The echoed slide guitar is an improvised nightmare. It doesnt play along with the vocals or the main guitar part in any formal way. But even though this entire thing took less than half an hour, if I tried to go back and redo this track I would never get it to sound this way again in a million years. There is a kind of magic in that, I think. Its rough, imperfect and all over the place but it stands as what it is. William S. Burroughs used to make "shotgun paintings" where he would paint or sketch a rough piece of plywood and then repeatedly fire a shotgun at it to add texture. Even though Burroughs was a complete genius in every medium and Im just a guy who gets bored and plays guitar I think its kind of the same concept.

So, there you have it. Music can be easy and rewarding if you use your imagination and dont try and over-think what youre doing.

Billie

I should add that these lines:

"Is this explanation sane?
Im trusting that this explanation is sane...
Eventually my friends are going to take me there...."

were not even "written" by me. A friend said this is what they heard when they listened and I absolutely loved it.