I got the Juno out last night for a pretty major session in “Vangelis World”. OK, so he had a Yamaha CS-80 (ie. a very expensive and rare keyboard)… good for him. But it was lots of thundering sub bass, arpeggiators and 80s-sounding synth pad sounds until late into the (freezing cold) night. I was working on a couple of tracks – Writing Home, one of my favourite tracks on the album, and A Thousand Years which is a very simple “Irish” ballad about fishermen going out to sea.
At the end of these night sessions, I put together two iPhone playlists – “Sketches” and “Production”, which is a shifting balance as we progress. It’s nice when one moves out of the former into the latter because it’s far enough along the line to make it. Listening to these tracks on the bus, wandering around in the world, makes so much more sense than trying to get perspective with a pair of headphones on in the thick of a session. I just seem to find so much more clarity when I have the wind in my face and I see people walking about. It’s so easy to think, “I need to lose that. Nah, that’s too fussy. OVER-SINGING, TWAT!!! Mmm, that bassline is too loud too soon…” etc.
It is, however, a fine line between getting familiar with the tracks enough to know what the right thing to do with them is (or might be) and getting bored with them. So far, I’ve been OK, still focused enough to feel them as musical entities, not just white noise full of problems. The current drive is to strip back, back further, to the minimum number of ingredients to create the sonic worlds that best suit the lyrics. It’s so easy to forget that they are a big part of it.
I’m going back to one of my favourite singers as inspiration… Mark Knopfler. He just sings the song. Doesn’t try, just does. I need to do that, fundamentally. Can you imagine what Dire Straits would have sounded like if he had been able to do vocal fireworks? It would have been ridiculous. He gave me the hope that I could find something in my own voice that would be a unique slant on the stories I wanted to tell. Now Maurice has come in with some of the finest lyrics I’ve ever heard, and I have the privilege to sing them. All I have to do is not fuck it up. Easier said than done.