This one was tough. I haven’t written a song in a few weeks but I’ve been reading a lot of Raymond Carver and writing little poems and short stories so yesterday I sat down and decided to make some lyrics happen, thinking it would just come to me. And it did. But it was bad. The lyrics didn’t work rhythmically and I thought “well, I’ve got some chord changes I like, I’ll sleep on it.”

When I came back to the song today, it was even worse than I’d remembered it being, which doesn’t happen to me that often. I wrenched on it for a bit and figured if I just started recording, something would click.

I tried a new technique. I recorded drums to a click with no other scratch instruments going, then ran the recorded drums from the Tascam model 12 through 1/4 tape. I put that in GarageBand on my phone and built the track from there. Pretty basic stuff but I’d never combined my model 12/tape process with my GarageBand iPhone mic process. I’m happy with how it turned out. The drums going through tape put some funny little warbles in there that knocked it off it’s 75 BPM so I couldn’t line it up in the grid past about 25 seconds.

After I got the instruments on, I tried out my lyrics from yesterday - not good.

Then I tried a lead guitar line going through it, kind of mapping out a vocal line like I’ve done in the past - also not very good.

Then I tried reciting some original poetry over it. I loved it. It was weird and exciting, and bold. I sounded like Kerouac, I sounded Heron. Then I went on a walk, came back and listened again - and it turned out it was actually really trite and shitty and thin.

I got frustrated and went on another walk, came back, added the synth line, the handclaps and the tambourine and called it a day.

I could picture horns playing that synth line and Ivan really digging in to the bridge section.