The road to Antibes

I wrote a little about this song a few days ago. Since writing, I have completed the arrangement, lowered the song's key so that I can sing it, recorded the vocal track and uploaded the song to Soundclick where it can be found in all its glory. Please give it a play.

A few words about the arrangement: when I first started sequencing the song, I gave it a fairly mundane introduction of alternating Em and Bm chords. Later on I changed this for a sequence Am|Bm7|C|Bm7|Am|Bm7|C|D, which then led into the Em verse.This introduction stayed for about three days, until suddenly I played a little oboe lick with a flattened fifth. This sounded so good that I had to start with this lick - upon which the rest of the introduction seemed out of place, so I dropped it. Starting in Am also reminded me very strongly of my song 'In silence' which effectively uses the same trick of starting in a different key from the song, so I transposed the intro down to Em.

I looked at the words which I had written on 15 December 1972; I remember being unsatisfied with them then but being unable to write anything better. Of the two extant verses, I kept the first four lines and threw away the rest, meaning that on Friday night I basically wrote all the  song's lyrics from scratch. They're still not particularly good but they're not that bad. The third verse references the jazz festival -

The roads of Antibes at festival time
Jazz percolates from the streets
The sounds of Antibes head straight for the heart
Arpeggios for free
Saxophones and oboes too
What's my wish? Well, here's a clue
Take me back

As it happens, the arrangement was featuring my two favourite wind instruments, the flute and the oboe, but if the lyrics are referencing the saxophone (surely the instrument most identified with jazz) then the arrangement too will have to feature a saxophone. So the flute became a soprano saxophone and all was well with the world again.

I always forget how to record my vocals in order to get a good result. The first recording on Saturday morning was fine from a technique point of view but did not sound good; no amount of effects (eq, reverb etc) could give me the sound that I wanted. So I sang the song again, very quietly, from the back of my throat. This produces a very warm sound which can be treated in order to create the final vocal.