Last night at 2 AM, after two 10-hour days, I finally pushed export on what will be the final recording of the first song of my first album.
It was “take 4”, so in total I’ve probably spent over 40 hours on this song.
Unlike my EP or live album, I went painstakingly through every track to make sure the mix felt comfortable. I fumbled around with 30 types of delay and reverb and spent hours on EQ making sure the instruments stopped fighting with each other in the mix.
I still feel the bass is being a bit combative with other tracks. I got it to stop fighting with the guitars but it’s pulled the vocals into the background and there are 8 vocal tracks so I want to try and push them back to the front without sealing the bass too much.
For that I’ve hired a friend who has been self producing for much longer than I have and understands compression, saturation, and sound and electronics better than I do.
I sent it this morning. It’s called “Speaking Leaves”.
This album is meant to take place in a realm tangential to this one where only emotions and memories live so this song is a tuning to that frequency.
On the live album it was more of a psychedelic prog folk rock vibe. This version is slower and more of a chant that you you can participate on.
For the first time in my life I really feel like I’ve developed my own style, obviously influenced by others but undeniably distinct.
I see it as the song that most represents this album, as the other songs tell a story and this is more of a peek into the realm where these songs live.
From today I will work towards completing two other songs.
One is the booked, the song that serves as a channel back into this realm. It’s another old song from my acoustic guitar days that still remains mostly in tact as it was but with a lot more delay (unlike “Speaking Leaves” which has undergone a complete transformation). Up until now it never felt like part of a story but when the concept for this album started coming together, I realized it had been waiting an entire decade for me to get to work on this album.
The other song I will get to work on is a song about death and rebirth. It serves as a literal sea change, as the song very clearly calls upon the ocean’s waves. Like all the other songs in this story, it attempts to bring meaning to suffering and to dissolve hopelessness into peace and purpose.
I am very eager to finish these two songs now because as soon as I do I can get to work on the two songs I haven’t made demos of and haven’t played live yet. One is essentially complete but I am super excited to test out some seasoning I can add to bring out its hidden flavors.
Then the last song I’ve yet to complete is likely to be the most heartbreaking song of the album. It represents the earth and soil and is the one most personal to me. Each of these songs has a main character and this is the one most connected to my own struggles and cycles.
I wanted it that song to be fresh when I finished recording the album, as this album will mark a turning point in my life without a doubt, and that will be the most cathartic for me.
In the beginning of the month we had a show in a dirt hole with whale’s jaw bone right in front of us, surrounded by an audience in a tatami room in an old Japanese house.
I took the invitation to play there as a sign that I needed to take a break from playing shows the rest of the summer and take the gift of earth that was given to me and create something that could potentially lay to rest that inking I’ve had since I was a child, that feeling that I never belonged here in this world.
So after these three relatively upbeat or atmospheric magical songs, I will get into the gritty emotional stuff, the three songs that were the most painful and cathartic to write.
It will be a shift from the urge to connect with nature and feel at peace to full on shadow work. I already went through that whole process in writing, but I will have to put periods on all those sentences.
Finally after the 3 otherworldly songs, and the 3 emotional songs, it will be time to finish recording the tracks that serve as glue to hold everything together and allow for a bridge between the world of the physical and the world of the emotion to hold strong enough to carry all this weight across it and still feel good. Those three tracks will likely be the fastest to complete.
Here’s a clip from “Speaking Leaves” live, first the version that is halfway to the version on the album now, then the psychedelic rock version I was playing a few months ago. And below that is a clip from the show we played in the dirt.
I + Everything Live - Water and Air
