Writing Session for Some Things You Never Wash Away
Our plan for this new record is to craft it as much in the studio as possible. The last record was written and performed several times before we tracked it, so most of the arrangements, parts and words were polished up before tracking started. This time, we decided to take the ideas we've been working on and track them as we solidify the arrangements (the internal song order and how long each section lasts). We can begin to form a cue track even if we don't have our individual parts together, and craft the final parts with the tape rolling. We spend 75% of our sessions tracking. The remaining 25% are devoted to finalizing the arrangements.
This saturday our goal was to polish up Some Things You Never Wash Away. We wrote this tune about 6 months ago, with an In My Time of Dying flow to it. In the end, we had a decent tune that was about 7 minutes long, with short verses and long choruses. The nuts and bolts were there, but an edit was needed. Mel and Tyler took a stab at the main revision while Cranfill and I did acoustic tracking. What they returned with is a much more concise tune, one that has a better dynamic range and meanders far less.
For my part, I first had to unlearn the old version. Most of the writing session for me was getting the new arrangement under my fingers so that I could listen to it as its own song, and less like a new version of an old song. And there's also something that happens when you write a tune and present it to a band. Originally, this tune was a drum groove that scott was playing. Tyler and I started vamping some changes over it and settled on a short progression. That inspired some lyrics from Tyler, so he ran with it and returned with a completed tune. The tension in the writing process comes when you transfer 'my idea' to 'our idea'. I mentioned to Tyler in our session that I hadn't much feedback on the arrangement yet because I was still unlearning the old one, and I wasn't sure what parts of the new arrangement he was married to and what he wasn't.
This is a vital thing to learn when working with someone's idea. When I bring in a tune, it's pretty much fully formed. I write my riffs and progressions based upon drum grooves and lines I hear in my head. So, I try to find representative loops (or drum my own simple loop) and make a fleshed out demo version of the song to help communicate my thoughts. I try to compose these demo pieces around the way I think my bandmates will handle their parts, so that when they put in their parts, the general groove and structure remains the same. But, I am somewhat married to the groove, the tempo and the structures as I craft my parts around them. So it's important for the band to know that, and important for me to allow space within my ideas for them to be expressive without a total direction change. It's a very delicate line.
With this tune, we're learning what aspects of the arrangement are important to remain and what can be altered slightly. Having listened to the rehearsal take, I think we're 80% there, and the rewrite is a million times better than the former version. I'm confident we'll have this one on the ropes shortly!
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