I’m hoping to make this an abbreviated entry today – I’m actually (finally!) on schedule. I started working in the evening and it was… not good. It started with deep ambient. Then went to rhythmic ambient. Then ambient techno. Then glitch.
The glitch thing had promise, if only a glimpse of it. I had actually rendered three separate tracks and was about to go in an do surgery. They were the rhythmic background to the motif you hear that opens this track. And they just never sat right. I’m not sure if they were just completely and mutually incompatible or if I just didn’t have the mojo to make it work. I kept at it, though, expecting to just end up with a contractual obligation track – I need to post something.
- We Were the Kings Ray Toler 5:38
Actually, that’s not fair. I would actually classify it more as an experimental track. Sometimes you have to throw things at the wall that are so far outside your comfort zone that you have no idea if the final mix is going to be awesome or suck. That’s where I was, but I lost interest in the experiment and muted the glitch tracks.
The loop was kind of cool though. Moody. I wasn’t in the right space for it, though, and continued to flounder around. I started humming to it and opened up the lyrics I wrote a few days ago when I remembered I’m not Trent Reznor. They were still pretty bad, but at least this music seemed to fit them a little better. It’s kind of Robert Smith / Cure-ish, though. Maybe… what if I tweaked that line a bit? That’s better. Less direct. More vague. More abstract. What if I didn’t actually say that but said this instead? Yeah… that’s not terrible. Not great, but not terrible.
This went on for quite some time at which point I thought I had enough to post a contractual obligation track. I even toyed with using the glitch tracks at a very low volume to provide more animation. I went downstairs and high-fived Mary.
“Congratulate me, Mary, for I have written the most God-awful Robert-Smith-Disintegration-Cure wannabe track of all time.”
“It can’t be that bad.”
“It’s awful. It’s so bad. But fuck it. I have to do something, and this is what I’ve done. Do you want to hear what I’ve got?”
Calling her sanity into question, she did. And that’s when Mary saved this song.
Perspective
Like me, she liked the opening effect-laden pianos. And the lyrics were ok. What she couldn’t get past was me standing there like an idiot and doing this terrible emo voice. So I sang a couple of the lines “straight” and realized that I’d gotten so far into my own head that I couldn’t hear anything but that weird emo thing while there was, in fact, a potentially decent song in there somewhere.
Mary said she heard the last line of the last chorus going up instead of down, and repeated that she liked the music aspect of it (still just that piano loop and some basic drums) but that she was saying goodnight and going to bed. I sat down with renewed energy and some needed perspective.
I messed around with various drum sets, found a pattern that I liked, set it to half time, and then I picked up the guitar. And everything clicked. I was basically playing the bass part on guitar, but with that nice rich chorus. Recording guitar is not something I’m good at, so it took me several takes. It was pretty obvious that the chorus was going to be heavy, so I found a couple of settings on the Kemper that I liked and recorded those. Power chords in drop-D? Yeah, those I can do.
Much of the rest of the night was spent on the drums, printing all the parts, then doing a rough mix. I’m not very experienced with rock mixes, so I was just doing my best to keep everything out of everything else’s way. Instead of a bass guitar, I decided to go with a slightly detuned synth bass. It has a long decay, so I’d just do short notes and let it fade on everything except the chorus where I held the long pedal notes. I knew this was going to be muddy as hell in the bass register, especially against the kick drum, so I did a quick side chain that ducks the bass out every time the kick hits. I tweaked that until I could see it on the meters but couldn’t discern the synth dipping in volume.
Here’s Mud in Your Ear
In the morning, I recorded vocals. Because each line was so separated from the others, I didn’t do my recent usual of singing through several takes and then comping something together. Instead, I sang all the way through, then went back and punched in on the things that weren’t right until they were. I did my best to hold pitch on those full-chest full-volume sustains, but I would obviously need to spend more than an hour on vocals if I were going to release this track to the world. Or maybe hire a rock vocalist.
With the vocals recorded and decent enough, I quickly threw together effects chains for the verse and chorus vocals. The verses are single-voice with some reverb, a slap-back delay, and a longer half-note ducked delay. The choruses are mechanically doubled with the Eventide H3000 (a classic sound from the 80s), and then I manually doubled the last “I want the world to be newwwwww” sustains at the end of the second chorus. I left the quiet “I want the world…” lines pretty much dry.
The final mix was more about setting levels, managing bass, a couple of fader moves here and there and… done? Almost. I couldn’t really hear the piano parts in the choruses, so I took the lower one out entirely and lowered the upper one so that it wouldn’t be stealing energy but also wouldn’t leave a hole in that part of the frequency range. I thought I had the final mix done, but when I listened at reference volume on speakers, it was still kind of harsh in the midrange. I threw one more EQ onto the mastering chain and that seemed to do the trick.
I’m not sure if it’s a good mix, but it’s at least translating well. I’ve listened to it on a 2.1 system (and boy, does that bass make the room shake!), headphones, earbuds, a phone, and a TV. It doesn’t sound bad to me on any of them, and that’s as much as I can ask for, especially in February. I’d like to get better at rock mixes, but there’s a lot to learn!
This one turned out very similar to a song I did a year or two before I started with Song-A-Day called Empty. I haven’t done a back-to-back listen, so they may be more different than I think, but the overall vibe is the same. The main difference is that I think Empty, while written in a day or so, took me months to get to the same state you hear on this track and I never really considered it finished. There are some things I could add to this one, but it’s in pretty good shape.
Oh, the final conundrum… what to call it? In my head, I’d been calling it I Want the World to be New, but when I asked Mary what the title should be (without any prompting), she immediately said “We Were the Kings.” Her instincts were right about the song, so she should probably get to name it. It makes sense – that’s the line most people would remember, and it does “disguise” what I consider the key point of the song a bit.
Time to go back to the studio and start working on the next track, though. I wonder what it’s going to be.
Lyrics
Dust collects around me
Fragments of a dying dream
The thistles grow
Stabbing attempts at renewed desire
And an old regime
Unaware of the craters and
Sitting here eating the past
While the room crumbles around me
I knew it was never going to last
We were the kings
We were everything
We were the lords
And now we’re bored
I want the world to be new
Locusts eat the oceans
As I watch wishing for more
Than fields turned fallow
More than a mind turned shallow
The universe expands without mercy
Without threat or attack
I’m never going forward
And I’m never going back
Colophon
Instruments & Samples
Omnisphere, Keyscape, Superior Drummer 3, Squier Stratocaster
Effects, Mixing, & Mastering
FabFilter, Valhalla, Kemper Profiler, H3000 Factory, Gullfoss, Kraftur