the vase (demo)

July 19, 2009 10:35 PM

As a follow-up to this post, here is the demo I recorded for the song I posted a long time ago here. As before, the idea is to share something about the evolution of my songs for anyone who might care.

posted by edlundart (4 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite

You're not asking us to pick a favorite of the two are ya? Ha! That's impossible! They're both pretty moving works.

This version is really striking, though. I like this mellower instrumentation, and you're doing really great stuff with the vocals. Those effects are just strong enough to be an important element without being distracting.

I love the full stop before the outro too. This is great stuff and thanks for posting it.
posted by snsranch at 4:14 PM on July 20, 2009


I loved the first one, but this is...well, I'm going to give you a certain compliment that I've never used before, and probably never will, again. Consider yourself special.

This sounds like something you'd hear from the best coffeeshop guitarist I've ever heard. Like one of those rare ones that's not just a douchebag playing Crash Into Me, and everyone actually stops in their stupid conversations, slowly, to pay it attention. By the end, you're greeted with a few seconds of silence, and then either raucous applause, the likes of which will never be heard again in that shop, or a few seconds of contented silence before everyone starts chattering over their scones, once more.

It's doubly fantastic that the lyrics are still very light and not about what you'd think on first listen.
posted by askmeaboutLOOM at 6:04 AM on July 21, 2009


It's doubly fantastic that the lyrics are still very light and not about what you'd think on first listen

I said something similar when he posted the original, I think, and I still think that's a great quality of this song: it sounds very serious, and the fact that the lyrics are not grave and somber makes it even better.

I remember thinking that the original was a demo (probably, I read now, because you said it was recorded without a metronome or a reference track) so I was surprised to see a demo of this song. But that's just a side note. I like the song a lot (as I remember, it might have been the first of yours that made me memorize your name to look for more posts by you) and I'll always love to sneak into processes like this. If you keep posting them, I'll keep listening.
posted by micayetoca at 2:15 PM on July 21, 2009


I really appreciate the nice comments, thanks. I sometimes hear that people like my acoustic versions, and I often wonder how I might get some of the vibe from those takes into more well-produced versions. I guess I'm not the only one to struggle with that.

askmeaboutLOOM, your compliment is awesome and I really understand what you mean. I'm flattered by it.

micayetoca: it's true, the other version of this song is rather unstudied as well, so in a way they could both be demos. My demos are not really demos in the sense of trying to work out the arrangement of a song or anything, they're usually just me recording something I came up with so that I'll remember how it goes. It's like a note to myself. I record them with one microphone in one take, so the quality of the recordings is never that great. But, they will sometimes have a certain something... a spark, I suppose. Sometimes I'm not 100% sure about the melody yet, so the vocal will wander a bit here and there. Some lyrics will be a bit off, etc. There's a purity to recordings of something that was just "invented", you know?
posted by edlundart at 7:04 PM on July 21, 2009


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