I uploaded a new song to Soundclick today, called "You think that you know him". It's not a new song, but rather a new arrangement. I found an earlier version of this on my hard disk the other day which I had forgotten about, as for the last few months I've been working exclusively on a cd of cover versions (which I'm not allowed to upload to Soundclick for copyright reasons). Anyway, I listened to this version, was generally pleased by it but realised that there were bits and pieces which needed to be improved. A few hours later, I had the music finalised, mixed it with the vocal which I had recorded whenever, and hey presto! A new track.
Here's what I wrote to a friend about the genesis of the song (in February 2002):
On Thursday evening I had been asked to play the guitar at someone's 40th birthday party, and so I played all these old Israeli songs. Most of them seemed to be in the key of A minor, and a fair number were waltzes.
On Friday morning, I thought to myself that I too could put together a waltz in A minor without too much difficulty. I laid down a chord sequence, but it was very stiff. Later that evening I thought that if I change this chord to that, and that chord to this, then something interesting might emerge.
And what do you know? On Saturday morning, I already had a chord sequence and tune. I dug out the bits of paper [on which I had been writing notes to myself], tried fitting words to the tune, and suddenly I had a verse. I typed it into the computer, and off the cuff added a second. I tried singing it, made a few adjustments, and suddenly a third verse (the fourth in the song) appeared. After a bit more cogitation the final verse appeared as if by magic. To make things interesting, I changed the pronouns, so instead of me singing about someone else, I'm now giving advice to a friend about what to do (the title was originally "You think that you know me"). Thinking about it a little more, maybe I should change all the "she's" to "he", and the "her's" to "him" - that'll make it into me singing to a female friend.
The words themselves have very little basis in real life, so don't read to much into them.
It's been my experience that the arrangements which I did in pre-Reason days need to be thinned out in order to sound good in Reason: Reason instruments take up more audio space and so there should be fewer of them. For this new arrangement, I combined the parts of two instruments into one, which made the result less cluttered. To my ears, there's a nice reverby bounce to this tune which I like.
I remember that when I was working on the song, I wanted something different for the solo section in the middle. I was wandering around the Internet when I came upon a flamenco rhythm in 3/4; ideal, I thought, and incorporated this into the arrangement. The original MIDI sounded much more Spanish than this version does, but that doesn't bother me too much.
Anyway, please give it a listen and also give it a positive vote - I think that this song could do well in the Soundclick charts.
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Continuing the unfortunate sequence of rock musicians' deaths, today I read about Boz Burrell, one time bassist and singer for King Crimson and later to find fame with Bad Company. Although he was in KC for only a short time, I managed to see that line up three times in the space of six months. He was 60 when he died.
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