Mary Anne – Ray Toler

There are a couple of special days in Song-A-Day. Sometimes, it’s a random thing where someone issues a general challenge of some sort: ”Disco Monday,” “Write something with this as the title,” and, of course, there’s the non-mandatory cover day on the 22^nd, but the halfway point is Valentines Day. The 14^th is a great opportunity to write a love song or, at the very least, a thank you or apology for having to put up with the madness of the month.

I’ve written before about how a variety of self-inflicted hesitations made love songs very difficult for me but, as with so many other things, Song-A-Day has helped me over that hill. For the last week, I’ve had that vague “think of a love song idea” thing in the back of my mind, but nothing concrete had shown up.

Mary Anne Ray Toler 2:44

After finishing The Crossing relatively early in the day, I asked Mary if she had any requests. If I can’t come up with an actual love song, I can at least do something she likes. It was no surprise when she said, “Well, you know I always like a piano piece.” In the early years of our life together, I had already written a lot of solo piano works, and had this idea for an album combining solo piano works with some of my string waltzes that I was going to title Hammers and Bows. That may still see the light of day at some point, especially now that I have string libraries that sound good.

We were chatting about that and one of those early pieces came up, but she couldn’t remember the title. She sang the main melody for me and her singing was fine, but with no rhythmic or other contextual clues, I still didn’t know which one she meant. What she sang, though, gave me one of those lovely moments where most of a piece of music pops in my head – I hear everything and just have to figure out how to translate it as best I can.

Best Way to Carnegie Hall

There’s one problem with my solo piano pieces. Ok, two. First, I’m not a good pianist. Second, many of my “solo” piano pieces couldn’t actually be played by a great pianist, much less me. I write things that require 3 or more hands and multiple pianos to achieve. Overlapping notes, physically impossible runs, different sustain patterns…

I’m good at what I can do (obviously), but I only took a couple of weeks of lessons in my Jr. High days and am mostly self-taught, with all of the bad habits and lack of exposure that entails. My left hand plays octaves or rolling thirds, my right hand plays chords. Blame Elton John, Billy Joel, and my attempts at playing George Winston stuff for that.

It is frustrating, though, when I know what I want to play and can’t play it. I spent about six hours on this piece and five of those were me trying to learn how to play the parts. Practice, man, practice. I got pretty good at the basic piece, but couldn’t ever get a take recorded, and it sounded thin to me.

It’s been awhile since I did one of these, and at one point I asked myself, “how the hell did you used to do this?” and thought back to those early days. I didn’t have a computer, just an Ensoniq EPS sampler, which had a really nice on-board sequencer. The environment in which we work has a huge impact on what we make – the Ensoniq sequencer was the reason I made tracks like Right and those overly complicated piano things.

I remembered that while I did play the basic things, just as I was doing now, when it came time to arrange and record, I broke out the hands into separate tracks. I can’t play the runs or patterns with my left hand, but a bet I could if I used TWO hands! And as long as I’m using two for the lower part, I should probably use two for the upper part as well.

Some of my earlier pieces would do this three or four times. This one only does it twice (upper and lower parts) and I’m pretty sure that a really good pianist can play this one, certainly with a couple of small changes, but maybe even as written.¹ And there are sections where it’s just me actually playing live.

Love and Rockets

Mary and I have been on a wonderful journey together and as I’m sure many other couples know, there’s no way for me to explain or describe the depth and complexity of it. Phrases like “I would be lost without you” or “you’re my everything”² are as good a window as showing someone who’s never seen a 747 a paper airplane and expecting them to understand. There’s just nothing that comes close.

With that in mind, this piece is a paper airplane. It’s not interpretive, other than to capture some abstract overall feeling. It can’t be representative or interpretive. There’s just no way. I don’t have the skill. I’m not sure anyone would. But it’s a gesture of expression and has made her happy.

And it’s special to me, not only because I was thinking of her the entire time I wrote it,³ but also because it came entirely from her recollection of something that I’d done 20 years ago. It’s eternal and circular.

Colophon

Instruments & Samples

Pianoteq

Effects, Mixing, & Mastering

FabFilter, Cinematic Rooms, UAD ATR-102

Notes

1
I’m 85% sure there’s no point where there are more than ten notes or a physically impossible stretch.
2
Blechhh. True, but… blechhh.
3
Except for when I was yelling at myself for not practicing more as a kid