Thursday, April 22, 2010

Completely Out of Season

Here's a song I wrote in, I think, the 1990s. I had been working on a version with the recording setup I was using at the time, but I can't even find those tapes, let alone having to deal with the moisture damage like with my other old recordings as chronicled ad nauseam in previous posts. (Yes, it really is spelled nauseam, not nauseum. No, I didn't know either.)

December Comes November Leaves is, as you might guess, about December coming and November leaving. Now, you might think that may lend itself to a certain air of, shall we say, mind-numbing melancholy, and you might have been right if you weren't talking about something written by me. Not being one for moderation, I decided to blow past melancholy town and head straight for maudlinville.

The recording procedure was complicated a tad by the fact that all I had from my earlier work on the song was my fabulous memory and a highly defective MIDI file I'd managed to rescue from the clutches of the ancient Atari ST computer I was using back then. I was also missing a copy of the lyrics. I could only remember about half of the verses, and you know that dumb guitar solo? The electric guitar is playing the melody of the vocal part of the bridge. I have no idea what the lyrics were any more, so the guitar gets stuck with it. I suppose I could have sung "doo doo doo" in lieu of lyrics, but lets face it, my vocals generally end up sounding like "doo doo" and belonging in the loo, so count your blessings. That's almost 30 seconds of me not singing.

You're welcome.

You can still hear a touch of the old MIDI file data, in that thing that sounds somewhere between a harpsichord and a toy piano. Everything else was replaced with either new MIDI programming or something played for real, like the bass part. Speaking of basses and parts, this is the first time I've used my little friend in a recording, and I am happy to report that it plays and sounds very nice for a junky piece of crap.

December Comes November Leaves (3.57 MB mp3) download from MediaFire

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