Unfinished songs. For whatever reason, I always seem to have a number of open ended opuses floating around on my hard drive. Either the muse has deserted me, and, rather than persevere and spoil a good idea, I shelve it for a while, or, another more immediate idea has come along and hijacked my brain. In my current vein of creativity, the latter is usually the case, and I don't like to turn off the tap while its flowing, so I often tend to start on the new idea straightaway.
But sooner or later, the unfinished songs need to be revisited, and this can be a difficult task. I have earmarked three recently that I want to "put to bed". The first of which is a song I wrote in Bouges, France, last summer called "My Baby Paints the Stars". The arrangement was somewhat dictated by my surroundings, all the instrumentation and samples being done with my portable keyboard and laptop, so it is, unusually for one of my songs, guitar-free! The backtrack I have always been happy with, but the vocal (recorded badly because I forgot a certain cable) I was less enamoured with, exacerbated by an unenthusiastic review from our gracious hosts in Bouges!
So, yesterday, I began to re-record the vocals. This process can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, my fresh look at the song produced some nice additional counter-harmonies towards the end, which Im really happy with, but as soon as I started recording over the original vocal I felt I was losing something. I think it's true to say that, whatever the shortcomings in the initial performance, or technical drawbacks, there is a great deal to be said for the spontaneity of that first take, which, in this case, was inspired by my surroundings, and the beautiful 17th century chateau in the French mountains where it was recorded. I struggled all day to recapture it. I think its a common problem, I've seen it many times in my career. I remember a band called "The Uncool Dance Band" who recorded locally in Yorkshire as we did back at the beginning of the 80s. They cliched a deal with Polydor, who promptly poured thousands of pounds into their first single, which had none of the magic of their bargain demo. (Its interesting to note that their bargain demo was produced in the same studio and by the same producer as the EP that unleashed Def Leppard on the world)
Similarly, our Portastudio version of "Walk Away Renee" had an atmosphere we never managed to recreate on 24 track with EMIs money. Our guitarist in Tubeless Hearts and Christie, Fos, almost without fail produced his best solos on the first or second take, it then becomes subject to the Law of diminishing returns, the more you chase "the moment" the less likely you are to find it. (We developed the technique of keeping his first solo, whilst other attempts were made, and invariably used the first one!)
I persevered yesterday, and, I think, 90% of the track is how I'd like it. I played it to Miki, who is a great sounding-board, and has good instincts for the "wrongness" in a track, and she immediately picked out three places where the vocal is too hard sounding. I left it for the day, and will return to it this afternoon. I know what I need to do, and that is put myself mentally in that 17th Century room, the half-open shutters filtering the sunlight across my face, a glimpse of Miki, painting, gazing out across the valley, and the vocal line will soften to perfection...
So, in my long-winded fashion, I guess I'm trying to say that although it can be an uphill struggle in the search for the required results, its not an altogether unpleasant business revisiting the scene of the crime!
Note: The photo below will appear in Miki's forthcoming 3D photo exhibition featuring "A Cat Called Caramel" our Song of the Month. You can hear it by clicking on the title!
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