We often get the question, "How do you go about writing a song?" Well, the answer is different for every song with us. Sometimes I come up with a guitar riff that sounds cool. Other times, Shay has lyrics bouncing around his head. And yet other times a song just seems to evolve on its own. A case in point is the song, "Never In A Million Years."
When Shay first wrote the song, it was really a quiet, simple song. One acoustic guitar, one voice. In fact, our first round of recording was exactly that. One guitar, one voice. And it sounded good, but it was missing.... something. I worked and worked on that song, and it just wasn't right to my ears. The song was simplistic, but it was almost too much so. It needed something else.
Enter Tim and Heather into the picture. At the time of the recording, I was living downstairs from them. They came down to listen to what I was working on, and I started hashing out ideas with them, while Tim and I enjoyed a little Scotch. I mentioned I was thinking about doing something with the electric guitar on it to fill it out. I was going to leave it at that, but Tim said, "Hey, just hook it up, and let's see how it sounds." So we did. And I started playing this riff on the electric that mimicked Shay's guitar, but much dirtier sounding. Wow! Suddenly the song sounded COMPLETELY different. Harder. Edgier. At Tim's insistence, we recorded the guitar track down. But now, the song was pretty even musically across the whole song, but Shay's vocals kick up a notch on the last verse. Well, then the guitar should do that also. So, we ran a guitar solo over top of Shay's last verse. That really jumped up the grittiness of the last verse.
Next up, was a bass line. I had a bass line all ready for the previous incarnation, but with the changes
we had made, it no longer fit. So I pull out the bass, and did a quick "How about this?" Tim, Heather and I worked over it till we found something that worked. By this time, I was getting a bit tired. I was ready to just call it a night, and record the bass the next night. But Tim was insistent. "Record it NOW, before you forget it!" He was right of course, so we did lay down the bass line.
It was at this point, that I realized that it was very very late at night, and Tim and I had finished 3/4 of the bottle of Scotch. I was instantly worried that everything we had recorded would turn out to be just drunken musical ramblings. Well, there was nothing for it at that point. Sleep was needed.
The next morning I got up (curiously without the expected hangover), and the very first thing I did was turn on the computer and listen to last nights recording. I was in complete shock, as it was as good to my sobered ears as it was the night before. In one night of fooling around with ideas, the song had practically evolved on it's own, and had turned into something neither Shay nor I had previously envisioned.
While we don't use electric guitars during our show, I think that that hard edginess to the song now comes though in our live performances. The song spoke. We listened.
I really enjoyed reading this post, as it took me back to my days of composing. "Record it NOW" was typical! :)
Posted by: Left Handed Guitar | August 26, 2009 at 09:34 AM