Writing on the Road

It’s getting good now.  I am in the final stages of recording.  Adding parts, finishing the arrangements and hopefully coming up with some lyrics.  I have a drummer coming next week and that is really the last piece missing before I go back and tighten everything up and sing final vocal passes and go into the mixing phase.

Thinking back on how some songs come about, I’ve been trying to figure out how this album matches the other ones. With ‘Reach’ I was playing about half the songs on the road before they even had lyrics.  The music was all done and I had a sense of the melodies so this was fun and the crowds didn’t notice because they had never heard them before.  I think it paid off because I had a really good sense of how the songs went before I ever started recording.  This past fall we were still on the road and I had some GREAT guys playing with me.  I started putting things in the set list like “new song 1 6/8 in E” and we’d play it.  They really didn’t know what was going on and I yelled out chord changes and off we went.  There are probably 4-5 new songs that still are making the cut that started that way.

I have also written a whole bunch just sitting on my couch.  I’ve noticed that the ones we played on the road stayed mostly the same and the newer ones, or the ones NOT played out have changed the most.  I make little mixes and listen to the rough tracks in my car or on my I-pod over and over.  Usually this gets pretty annoying.  But it lets me know which ones I get sick of or just aren’t going anywhere. Others I change melodies or arrangements on.  It’s the method I have to substitute for the whole ‘4 guys in a room playing at once’ scenario and it helps me ‘live’ in the songs.  Another thing that is important to me in the writing process is to let go of the fact that these are MY songs.  I try to get to a place where I hear them as preexisting songs so I ‘know’ how they go.

I have one brand new one that I wrote about 2 weeks ago.  It reminds me a little of David Gray.  I love it.  I thought I was done and I came up with a little riff on the acoustic and everything fell into place that night.I had a quick demo done for my trip to Colorado and I would wake up in the morning and sit on my balcony, look out at Pikes Peak in the sunshine and listen to it.  It sounds the way you feel when you look at something like that.  When I listen to it, actually it’s on right now, I truly can’t think of it as anything but what it is.  It came out pretty much done.  And it sounds like it sounds.  It just is.  Nice when that happens.

So after the drummer lays down his tracks, demos will be posted like crazy because I’ll be done with 90% of what I need to put them out there.  I hope you will like what you hear.

peace

mike