A day of vocal recording and production for A Drive Through The Town, as planned. I recorded the vocals for 'Anyone Can Fall In Love', 'Burning Meat Outdoors' and 'Pictures On My Telephone'. The latter was the most fun due to the drama of the tune, the first the most difficult because of the odd melody which shifts key with each chord change, but also required delicacy, being a gentle love song. Burning Meat was a bit frustrating, as it's focused on a low-E, a note which lacks power. I decided to move up an octave for the second repeat, which became rather high. Most songs benefitted from harmonies.
I did some general training too, though this served to remind me how difficult singing is.
The rest of the day was adding the vocals and tweaking the mixing all of the songs. The track listing is now:
I'm In Love With My Car
American Lawyer
Go To Bed And Miss Me
Excessive Consumption Has Laxative Effects
Pictures On My Telephone
Anyone Can Fall In Love
Style Guru Fashion Queen
Mister Moan
Incomplete Version Of The Writer
An Autumn Tale
Cat Parasites
Cat Covid
Burning Meat Outdoors
Thinking About The Cats I Used To Know
I'm reaching the end stages of the creative phase before the long mixing, mastering, filing, and promotion phases. These stages make me wonder why I'm doing this, making music nobody will hear or care about and will earn me little in money or prestige, perhaps even be forgotten in a blink... but no! This is wrong! Perhaps we shells on the beach can shout a sound, a burble in the puddles among a population of other burbles.
This is the soul of art: any sound is infinitely better than silence. Many great musicians of the past and present lose heart or vision, and sit in their silence. Yes, the world ignores me, it ignores us, it ignores all of us sooner or later; that's the nature of civilisation - only intimate relations are not ignored, and those relations are transient. This must be known and internally conquered. Nothing is ignored forever.
I listened to some music new to me recently, by Peter Godwin, a musician most well known for having his song 'Criminal World' covered by David Bowie, yet, I liked his early/mid 80s sound and wished he'd written and recorded more. Of course, back then, he may have wished the same.
This album is better, I think, than We Robot, a continual step up in performance and technical skills. A step up from the slow start of Fear Of The Thing Itself, and The Modern Game, and The Dusty Mirror. It took a long time, over a year, to make small improvements at first, but now I'm making better albums faster and faster, which must be a positive thing. This is one of my key aims; to learn and improve. Today's vocals were done quickly and easily; more easily than ever before.
There is less of a theme and message in A Drive Through The Town than in We Robot. Some songs are social or character observations. Some are surrealistic; unconscious inspired songs which then evolved new narratives, such as Cat Covid and Excessive Consumption. Incomplete Version and Autumn Tale are some of my oldest songs re-recorded. I'm sure that trend will continue as I've got a lot of older songs, several of which lack vocals but have some production laid out.
Let us burble. Onwards we march.
