10 hours working on the same song and I still don’t hate it. I guess I’ll take that as a positive…
This song is tricky. The stupid ones always are. It’s a rock tune and i don’t want to shy from that but I don’t want to make a lazy rock track… I have a basic guitar part which I record but no real strong idea for the chorus. Once my verses and bridge are recorded I look at Matt’s chorus idea and I work from that – his idea is snaky and bluesy. I try to keep it somewhat bluesy but more Old Brown Shoe than Brown Bomber. It takes me a while but I get there. I move his part down one octave and simplify the second half. I then overdub an octave part to bring out Matt’s melody. It’s good and it still sounds like me, whatever that means.
Next I record the off mic acoustic telecaster guitar/percussion track and then we move to the vocal…
The guide vocal, is nearly just right. but not quite. Charles knew it was good in LA and encouraged me to fine tune it and keep the good bits, we did that, but I don’t think it’s 100% great, so I sing more.
After an hour or so I don’t think I have anything which matches the guide for attitude, but there is lots of good stuff. I tell Mark that, as it’s getting late, we make a comp based on the guide and we’ll listen and fine tune later. Unfortunately this is far from simple as the guide turns out to be rather heavily compressed and slightly distorted (not in a bad way) so M spends a while trying to match this by sending the new tracks out and recompressing them… this works for me. The mixing engineer may hear tiny differences in nuance, but I’m sure it’s close enough to work with. The Final version may not be assembled yet, but I know we have another vocal now.
It’s 9.30 when I get home. Will and his pal have been waiting for me to serve dinner. We eat after 10. That’s unheard of out here in the country… and it’s why I didn’t write the day up that night…