New song: "Coming back"





This is the song that I challenged myself to finish before February, and showcases, for better or worse, the best of my abilities (and technical means) right now (the mix is a bit dull now and I will revise it in the future, when I'm not so close to the project).

As engineer and producer, I have learned a lot along this month, and it shows for example in my folders' structure. I know better at every moment what I'm doing and how. Taking a look at my previous process lists, I think my biggest problems were that I tended to standardize too soon, or not at the adequate "height" (for example, didn't have the "feel" for when you have to go deep in the woods or be more general ("use a 1.5 compression ratio" vs "play with the compression rate until it doesn't pump"). Of course you can always get better, and those were necessary errors that I'm happy to have gone through. Someone once defined the people at Toyota as "problem junkies", and it's a great attitude to have, so... bring on the problems! They'll always have me waiting with the knife and fork held high.

The guitar is recorded di, with an additional track with the SM58 pointing to the guitar strings, to capture some "air". A nifty trick I will try surely in the future, good to grab some air moving when there is not a physical amp available.

Now speaks the musician; the lyrics are open, deliberately vague and poetic, not intended to make perfect sense. To me the "coming back" refers to those times in life when you feel you have been estranged from yourself for a long time, perhaps even years, and you feel that it was necessary, yet sad, and you're just happy to find yourself back and trying to do your best so that it doesn't happen again. That is an individual interpretation, the lyrics are also open to a collective one, thinking of the moment the human species is living as a society, where I certainly feel a great need to "come back". In the vocals I tried to go for a Morrison/Danzig feel.

I feel I succeed as a musician when the song grabs something "intangible", something that opens and it's magic and alive. I'm happy to report that I feel ab it of those "butterflies" when the song "opens" to the instrumental after the two verses. The tremolo arrangement in the background has a clear influence of Bob Dylan's "Forever young" (the slow one). I'm also happy of the inspiration of humming the end verses. I was going to go for just a repeat verse and a fade out, but the producer caught me on time: "dude, you're being lazy". I like the ending I came up with, just playing the disonant chord I've used along the whole song and let it hanging. This got me thinking that, very often, the answer is not introducing a new element, but to explore better the ones you already have.

In spite of the limitations, speaking of the ground advanced, I'm very happy with this project. The amount of things that went wrong made me think at some points of that drummer in Spinal Tap who goes into spontanenous combustion :P To name a few, it took two versions from the ground up -it was supposed to be a simple project, you know-, there where software failures that obliged me to test three different DAWs in three different distros, I made a planning mistake that felt like the painter who corrals himself inside the room... What makes this time different from the others, as I've remarked in other posts, is that I faced each of those mistakes as learning opportunities, so they are all well researched and documented, and the mistakes that will occur int the future will be different, which is always stimulating.


COMING BACK

Coming back
from dumber decisions
brand new life always bound to start

Coming back
grant no permission
hearts of stone
still can build a fire

Coming back
change your definitions
find some time
under some rug

Coming back
forget with precision
damage's done
but it's alright

Coming back
look after your prison
hold on tight
till it comes apart
   
Coming back
ashes, tradition
is it life
or lead carcass

Take it back
bar your indecision
take the bite
or find the crack

Coming back
thriving on division
not your likes
but it's alright

Faces in the crowd
trying to get by
Solitude arrives
in disguise
creep back into the roots you never had

Coming back
dead television
words are sharp
so you take a stab

Coming back
final indecision
Growing up
like a roll of dices

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