Flying Over
September 2, 2010 7:50 PM
The year is 1996. I'm in my neighbor's tiny basement studio. I am making my first remotely professional recording. I am earnest. I am 17 years old.
Discussion in
this Talk thread has wandered to bad solos and at least marginally youthful indiscretions, and this goes for two for two.
I wrote this song in probably my junior year of high school, and for what it was at the time I'm willing to feel pretty good about it still, but boy was I an angsty teen exploring drama for drama's sake in my songwriting. It's not a song about me or anyone I knew; if anything it was vaguely riffing on Roger Waters' obsession with his dead dad, Pink Floyd obsessive that I was at the time, but even that's more subtext than thesis.
I had been doing a little bit of really rough multitrack recording in my bedroom by this point, literally bouncing track by track between two garage sale cassette decks with bad timing, not even aware that I could probably have gotten my hands on a proper fourtrack deck for cheap, and so the chance to actually do a full-up multitrack session with an actual recordist was really exciting to me.
I remember being very, very proud of this recording at the time. Looking back it's really not bad for a random know-nothing kid, but there are also so many problems with it—hackneyed lyrics, dozens of little timing problems, stumbling/winded vocals, solos that sound like they were as winged as in fact they were—that it's kind of heartening to know I've made progress over the years in my writing and recording skills.
I've thought over the years of re-recording it just for the hell of it, but I have such a hard time approaching the lyrics with a straight face that I keep not doing it.
This was pretty much the centerpiece recording in a bedroom cassette demo that I made right before I went to college, to give to friends back home and take with me to school. That demo,
all of which is here, otherwise mostly consists of songs recorded as single track solo guitar-and-vox-in-front-of-a-mic takes in a too-warm afternoon in my bedroom, the day before I got on a plane to the east coast.
When I was 17 I was leading the church band on piano and writing Christian ditties. I can only remember one that was any good, but like you I'm too appalled by what I can remember of the lyrics to even attempt a remake.
posted by unSane at 8:48 PM on September 2, 2010