I decided this morning that it'd be fun to try getting involved at long last with
Song Fight, but it turns out that submissions for the next round were due this morning. This is probably the most frantic writing-and-recording I've done in a couple years.
So at about 8:00 this morning I looked at the website's 9:59 deadline and thought "nah, there's no time".
But then the prompt of "Hardly A Moment" made me think of people talking in like romantic comedy terms of "having a moment" and the idea of a song that's mocking that phenomenon started to come together. So I wrote half a verse and part of a chorus and banged out a quick demo on my iPhone to fix it in my head.
And then I biked into St. Johns to deliver a couple packages, trying to flesh out the lyrics along the way. And the post office wasn't open yet, so that killed precious time, but it gave me a chance to spend from like 8:55 to 9:00 finishing the first verse and writing a bit of the pre-chorus and second verse.
Then mailed some things, biked home like a motherfucker and started recording at 9:15 or so. One take on piano, two takes on drums because the first one went even more wobbly than the second does, two-miced my guitar amp near and far, couldn't find a pick, tried without and didn't get anywhere, went looking, still didn't find one, used a penny instead which wasn't great (def. use a nickel at least, maybe a quarter) but did the job okay, squawked out a quick second guitar line late in the song for some more fatness.
And then vox, trying to do takes on a melody that still wasn't really written from brand new lyrics I hadn't memorized using phrasing that wasn't remotely firmed up yet, all this reading lyrics from two places, off both a notebook and a different virtual window on my laptop from the one Garageband was on. The clock was really ticking at this point, by 9:50 I hadn't gotten the vox anywhere near to feeling comfortable but gave the last third of the song a brute-force go of it and sat down to instamix the thing, encode it, and figure out the proper instructions for mailing it.
Basically zero mixing other than a few blind move-the-dials-and-hope-for-the-best tweaks (a bit of panning, some compression on a few tracks and a little limiting on the whole thing to try and duck any peaking problems likely to result from the non-mixing).
And I forgot to put my kick mic back on the kick drum before doing the kit, which is probably for the best since that would have eaten a few minutes minutes putting it on the kick and then putting it back on the guitar amp and as it is I mailed the thing all of five minutes before the deadline.
This was tremendous fun. I should probably rerecord the song a week from now and take a skosh more time to really do what I wanted with it, though.
You're staring deep in my eyes
You think you're gonna hypnotize me
Like some magic's gonna happen
If you sit real still and stare at me
And smile at me and glare at me
And put on all the faces that your magazines
Convinced you were
The trick to make me care
But darling
There's no there there
Yeah this was hardly a moment
What this was was an uncomfortable pause
Yeah that wasn't us clicking
That's just the sound that teeth make
When someone clenches their jaws
This was just you saying yes
And me saying no
And that's the way it goes sometimes
I'll be as clear as can
Darling I'm hardly your man
And this was hardly a moment
You gotta shake this misconception
You can't pull some sly inception
You can't trick us into being
Something other than we are
Cuz this is all we'll ever be
Single you and single me
Disjoint sets named A and B
Now
Step away from the car
posted by cortex at 10:26 AM on August 5, 2010