A steady day of music work. I was determined to charge in and get something completed.
Most of the day was work on I'm In Love With My Car. As I've mentioned, it was a rock song in my head but has transformed into an electro-pop song, and the day started with MIDI sequencing some powerful chord stabs which emulate the guitars I imagined, which were somewhere between those in Born To Be Wild and Queen's Tie Your Mother Down; a simple, rhythmic punch of chords. The booming lead I chose, plus the buzzy and powerful bass gives the track a dangerous industrial feeling, distorted synths. The song ends up almost like power-girl pop with a heavy-metal tinge, and the words which compare the car with a woman to be 'thrown on the scrap heap' makes the song overtly NOT a girl-group song. Creatively exciting.
The vocals are still needed, but the production is remarkably simple: drums, bass, those chords, and a synth lead, plus a grungy electric guitar solo, another rebellion against its own power pop. There are only 8 tracks, 4 of which make up the drum pattern, which is rare even for my efficient composition, and yet it works. There's careful interplay between the parts and lots of chugging to the song. Things may need moving when the vocals are added. I may need to distort those too.
Then work on a few other songs. First, preparing the backing for the Rock And Roll Is King song. I had enough to perform it live, but it needs a solo, and the vocals.
Then work (again!) on Thinking About The Cats I Used To Know. I recorded a new electric piano part, a moody single take, a few days ago and have used this today. It uses the E-minor/D-minor arrangement of the first idea, which sounds nicer than my second takes. This was/is played over a live recording of a street, but today I thought I'd add some off-kilter jazz drums which are totally not in time with the music. The brush drums are a little like the ones in Bowie's Bring Me The Disco King, but here totally not interacting with the music except that they retrigger for the main verse/chorus parts. These are distant and quite quiet, and add to the dual meaning of 'cats' as jazz musicians.
I rather like the fact that the music is at odds with that rhythm. The Shaggs did that. People call The Shaggs non-musical, crude, naïve, but they were musical. The two singers were in perfect unison, just not in time with the other parts. Fundamentally, it was the temporal independence which gave their songs the highly unusual quality, a social distance, a quality of the social misfit in music.
So, this track is (again) finished.
After that, more work on Cat Parasites. I'm stuck after the last verse but before the last chorus. I had the idea of wah guitar over the disjointed piano at the start, but I don't have a wah pedal, and the guitar timbre didn't sound quite right - I wanted a sound like a cat. I found a wah guitar sound on the MODX, and played with it, swapping the guitar sound for a violin and the result was exactly what I wanted, something like the 'cat' version of the adult voices in a Charlie Brown cartoon.
So the day ends well, but no vocals were recorded. This must be a next step. Tomorrow: monthly backups, the premiere of the Cycles III video (the single is released at midnight tonight), and the release of the Flatspace update. None of these things will take long, I will have time for vocals if I can have the house to myself.
