Drunk Again

Uke-driven boozer's lament. One of the demos I recorded yesterday for my album-in-a-month.

Out of the ten demos I recorded yesterday (of which more here), this one in particular has me charmed at the moment. Song is unfinished, I think—the wordless chorus will probably end up being wordful, for example—but as a weird breezy little thing I'm liking it.

The chime type stuff was a random idea yesterday with one of the less-used settings on my digital piano, but it helps set a sort of lounge mood that I think I might try to keep around for the final recording.

Production in general is very loose, as with the rest of the recordings from yesterday, in the interest of just getting stuff down as efficiently as possible.

I've got a production puzzle to figure out with the transition between this song and the next track on the album: this one moves into 5/4 vamp as a sort of pre-cursor to the next track, but while in my head they had been both the same tempo (and so the transition would be a seamless slip from one to the other), in practice it turns out the next song is quite a bit faster in tempo. Whether I should just break this song off before the 5/4 slip, or do some sort of intentional slow, stop, start-again-fast thing, or try and orchestrate an actual sliding tempo change, I don't know.

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posted by cortex (8 comments total)

Lyrics (such as they are currently):

Drunk again
Sitting here alone
Staring at the phone

Drunk again
Writing shitty poetry
Emo-kid inchoatery
posted by cortex at 11:04 AM on February 9, 2010

This has a really cool sound. Everything is good, and the fat bass puts a nice red ribbon on top.

Regarding your production quandary, I would say a couple of random words...perhaps related to the following song, to bridge the gap...and then punch right into the next song. That's a bit poetic, a little spoken word, a bit crazy and boundary breaking, but just might work for you.
posted by snsranch at 6:04 PM on February 9, 2010

Good stuff! Reminds me of Andrew Bird in the 1920s.
posted by pedmands at 9:29 PM on February 9, 2010

There's a lot of chimey sounds here, maybe you could offset that by emphasizing the vocal harmonies that come up from underneath the melody more?

As for the transition, could you slow this song down enough so that the next one was effectively double-time? Or is that too drastic on both ends? Otherwise I'd go with snsranch's suggestions and essentially atempo it for a few beats and then drop in hard with the new rhythmic figure.

P.S. Had to look up that last word!
posted by abc123xyzinfinity at 11:00 PM on February 9, 2010

I love the live feeling of this. The tune seems really classic, the sort you're surprised hasn't been popularized, you know the feeling? The only thing I would say, and this is probably just me, something about the reverb you've put on that ukulele feels artificial and doesn't fit with the rest of the song to me.
posted by Corduroy at 10:32 AM on February 12, 2010

Yeah, all the mixes on the demos are pretty quick and hamhanded -- I threw a lot of reverb on everything here just to make it a bit more spacey and smooth. When I do the final recordings I'll take the time to (a) mic things carefully and (b) actually tweak the compression/verb chain for the individual tracks to fit.

I'm in a weird post-frenetic-demoing space where I'm kind of almost afraid to start into the Real Work of tracking this stuff. I think hell or highwater, next week will have to see the commencement of serious recording.
posted by cortex at 11:26 AM on February 12, 2010

Double bass + ukulele + xylophone + brushes. Perfect. I like many, many things about it, but I gotta note the three note all-a-lone. If that's the chorus, and you accept votes, I'd vote for leaving it like that, it's just perfect as it is.

If I may cast another vote, don't put words to the last part (the one that starts around 2:27), it's also perfect as it is. Very, very nice song.
posted by micayetoca at 4:55 AM on February 13, 2010

micayetoca, I think you just wrote the chorus. I was just making nonsense noises, for the chorus bits, but I think doing it as, explicitly, "all alone" is a great idea. Keeps the loose, loungey feel while giving me a direct and thematically-appropriate lyrical hook to pin it around.
posted by cortex at 7:28 AM on February 13, 2010