Juliet Turner came down to the house on Sunday to sing on The Old Town. I had her in mind for this from the very beginning, so it felt good to get her beautiful voice into the song. I tried to do my own backing vocals a few weeks ago, and the whole track just seemed to fall to pieces and turn into an utter piece of budgie’s arse. Total rubbish. I nearly lost faith in it completely, and was eyeing up a playlist without it in there. But I remembered how much I love Matt Rudd’s visuals for the track and realised I would really miss them from the app.
Juliet saved the day.
I stripped the track back to just acoustic and my vocal to get things sitting right with her voice, and she found a delightful harmony just outside what I’d been hearing all along, so I went with her instinct. It was brilliant to hear her singing again.
Julie got finished on that track so quickly that I asked her to sing on Time To Fly… a great result. She then wanted to join in at the end of So Long, so we did that too. I put her voice through a Guitar Rig effect and it sounds very cool. All in all I guess you could say it was a pretty good afternoon, despite being on the Gatwick flight path and having to wait for various planes to get clear of south London so we could get on with another vocal take. Damn sensitive, these Neumann mics!
I adding some mellow single-take Juno synth to The Old Town tonight, going for a vibe and a feel rather than any form of accuracy, and I think it works fine. The song is very much inspired by one of my favourite Blue Nile tracks called From a Late Night Train, and so far I’m pretty happy with the sound. It is very risky even trying to go near that “Blue Nile thing”, as it’s so precious and amazing, and Paul Buchanan is possibly my favourite singer of all time… but even so, there’s nothing wrong with trying to evoke that same spirit of suburbia viewed through a lens of heartbreak and some kind of loss.
There is only a tiny bit of tracking left to do on Time To Fly then I’m happy to stop everything and just get it mixed.