Evolution of a Song :: The Tide

So, having done the first two songs of our record in order, I wanted to jump around a bit and make some commentary about the last song on the record, called The Tide.

In the past, I’ve been breaking up the technical evolution and the emotional, artistic commentary, but in this case, I find it hard to separate them, so I will have a go at putting it all together.

First, some background. Some of you may remember that I resigned from a church music position in the middle of July 2007 to focus on free lance music and The Dailies full time. Without getting into the history in too much detail, although there is a song on the record about this experience, called Two Years Ago, it’s important to understand that the experience of being a leader in this church during that season was an incredibly emotionally taxing experience.

So there we are in 2007, thinking about this record. Starting to sketch out our songs, our ideas, and I have a massive case of writers block mixed with a little post-regular work hours depression. Yes, an artist who gets depressed, how original, I know. It was during this season of turmoil that The Tempest was born.

By Thanksgiving of that year, I had reached my low point. I hadn’t written much. In fact, there are 2-3 songs from that period that never made it even into the demo stage. They were just too unfocused and uninteresting. The money that we’d saved as a safety net against regular paychecks had been mostly spent. It was taking forever to see payment from a couple of high profile singing gigs I had done, as it takes a long time for residuals to filter through the corporate and SAG / AFTRA systems. It was a bad scene.

We went to Erica’s Mom and Dad’s house for Thanksgiving that year. They live in a rural area East of San Diego near Alpine. They took one look at us early in the weekend and said something like… “Hey, umm… why we keep the kids on the last night and you guys go get a hotel somewhere and get away.” This sort of statement is like catnip to the parents of young children.

I went online and discovered that The Hotel Del Coronado was practically giving rooms away. It was the end of Thanksgiving weekend, and they were just trying to keep the hotel reasonably full. For the price of a night at the local Sheraton, we got a room at one of the coolest hotels in America.

That afternoon, we made our way down there and checked in. Erica suggested a walk on the beach, and so we got a little coffee and that’s what we did.

It was a crisp, California autumn day at the beach, cold… but not unpleasantly so. The air was clear and a smattering of clouds dotted the horizon. It was an absolutely beautiful afternoon. We were walking and talking and enjoying ourselves, and I realized two things. First, I was content. I hadn’t felt content in several months, and it was a refreshing feeling.

Second, I was struck by the beauty, the vastness, the majesty of the Pacific ocean. I realized that, even though we only live 20 minutes from the beach, that I hadn’t been down to see it all summer and fall. It had been beautiful every day, but I hadn’t come to see it. I had cloistered myself in my small studio, trying and failing to write good songs, but the ocean kept doing it’s thing, day in, and day out. The Tide did not care how I felt.

I found great comfort in this. I felt small, and unimportant. I felt like all the things I was stressing about were quite comical, and not at all interesting to this great, ancient, and massive thing that was my peaceful neighbor.

We finished our coffee, and went back to the room.

We had our guitars with us, Erica with her Taylor, me with my Fender acoustic bass. We often take them with us, even though neither of us are particularly great on them, to play together and relax. Erica sat down and started playing a simple little riff, that sounded like this:

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It pleased me. It hit me the right way. It was simple and lovely. I started playing a simple 8th note bass line underneath it, and began singing what came to me:

The waves roll out, and crash back in…
And I am somehow comforted by their indifference…

And our little song was born. The verses wouldn’t get written until much later, and we had a “B” section to the verses that got bagged and ultimately simplified and streamlined, but the essence of the song was created right there in a little room at the Hotel Del.

I’d say it was the 4th or 5th song we’d started, and yet immediately we knew that it was something special, and that it was going to be the last song on the record. I just had a sense about it.

Since I play exactly zero guitar, I had Erica lay down that little phrase once we got home. I started building parts around it, while crafting the lyric. Sometimes when I start a song, I just write, with not much of a goal in mind, this time, however, I knew with startling clarity what we were trying to say, and how to say it. The experience was simply too vivid to attempt anything other then simple describing what we felt in the moment itself.

It’s been too long since I stood here
At the edge of something vast
It’s been calling to me softly
And I answered it at last
Too long since I stood here
And let it wash my feet
Felt the touch of something ancient, something deep…

Once it was written, I demoed it up. Erica began a tradition during this time where she’d take the kids out of the house for several hours at a time on Mondays, as I was having a hard time focusing when I could hear them playing (or fighting) and wanting to engage. This demo was created on one of those days. We knew that Erica was going to sing lead from the moment we wrote it, so this is a rare and exciting chance to hear me singing way out of my range and making a general fool of myself. It should be noted, as I am listening right now to this demo for the first time in months, to hear the differences in the phrasing the way Erica heard it and sung it when it counted.

Anywhoo.. here’s my demo

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This is a great example of why we demo. On a tune like this, where we’re trying to go for a bit more of an epic sound, since we’re SOOO not guitar players, it’s hard to imagine it if we were just to sit around and play it for you. I, personally, need to hear it in a larger, more arranged context to make sure it’s gonna work. Also, since we have limited time in the studio with the band, we don’t have several hours to waste learning a tune. We have to give them a running start.

Speaking of the band guys, tracking this song lead to the single most enjoyable night of the Eldorado week. We did this one late in the game, and everyone had really settled into the flow. Also, this was the demo that everyone heard and had very little commentary. No one said… “Well, I hear where you’re going, but we’re going to have to consider this instead…” Everyone just sort of nodded and said, “That’s gonna be fun.”

And it was. It was magical, actually. Now, bear in mind that when we recorded “What It Is,” in 2006, we had already tracked final vocals against the demos. We had it in our heads that it would help the process if the guys could hear really focused, tight vocals to play against. It worked, sorta. What we learned was that when listening to that record, we feel like the vocals are somehow detached in places. The band was feeling it 11, but we had only sung it at 8, if you will.

This time, we had nothing previously tracked going into the studio. Erica or I would actually sing live with the band on the first 2-3 passes, to give them that central focal point, but then once we got a decent pass, we’d back out and let them just play it down.

During The Tide, I remember clearly thinking that something special was afoot. Even though Erica was behind the soundproofed glass, singing in the control room, and the band was scattered throughout the tracking rooms of Eldorado, there was a unity. She’d belt a chorus, and the band would respond. She’d go soft at the end, and the band would respond.

As I’ve been typing this, I went back into the sessions and found her original scratch vocal, recorded against the band. For those of you who are nerdy, this band track is nearly raw. I’ve put a limiter across the 2-buss, and there’s a little reverb across everything, but other then that, this is what it sounded like going to tape. This is also a cool glimpse into an end to end vocal, warts and pitchy notes and all. No edits, no comps, no tuning… even a bit of distortion as she overdrives the mic pre.

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That ending, with all the alternate voicings on piano, was entirely improvised. I remember thinking it was so beautiful, holding my breath, praying for no foul notes. There were none. It was one of those songs where you could tell they wanted to play it again, not because we needed another pass, but just because it felt so good to play.

We took it home and went to work. We had made an aesthetic choice as we prepared for this record that we were going to simplify the sound of the vocals. Vocalists get a little heady about vocal tricks. Doubles, triples, stacks, licks, runs, bleh. Erica and are sorta over it. We just want to sing a phrase with good feel and good vibe. We made a decision that we were going to double at most, and only when it felt right, let it be the icing on the cake, rather then slathered throughout the recipe.

We made one exception to this rule, and it was for this song, specifically the bridge. I remember working on it, playing the bass part and thinking, “This needs to be epic. This is almost like the concluding statement of our whole record… the sum of what we’re learning right now… the sum of our artistry in this moment.”

Therefore, we decided to let it rip, vocally. Double the melody on the octaves? Yes please. Flesh out the harmonies? Yup. OOOOHHHH, how about some percussive ooohs and aahs! BRING IT!

For most of this tune, it’s 2 channels of vocals. On the bridge, it’s 26 channels. I just counted. I remember when Stick got a hold of this track for mix, he protested mightily at the taxing of his computer’s processing. Even his mighty Pro Tools HD3 rig was forced to bow to the mighty choir of Chads and Ericas. (Somewhere in the woods in Northern California, a very nice, very talented, very reasonable gentleman is shaking his head and muttering… “88.2 sucks…”)

Here’s the “Vocals Up” rough mix that came out of our machine after we had laid everything down.

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So we were pretty stoked on this tune. I especially dig the bridge, with all the vocals and the moving bass line and everyone just doing for it. For me, the lyric there sort of sums up the entirety of our last (almost) two years.

I may yet survive the tempest
But I won’t outlive the tide
It will breathe when I lay breathless
It cares nothing for my pride
For I am but a vapor
Drifting towards that other shore
Like every generation, every pilgrim gone before

I know that some people get wierded out by the fact that we, our lives, are really a blink in the eye of time. I find great comfort in it, personally. The self is not the center of the universe. We are all a part of something bigger and grander, and this realization is one of the keys to a life of significance, ironically. It’s nice to know, when you’re in the valley, that there’s a bigger, more beautiful world out there. The question remains, will you ascend the slopes around you long enough to take it in.

Now, the problem was that when it came to mix, the bridge section wasn’t about to ascend a blessed thing. It was collapsing into itself. Stick built, and rebuilt it, and still it wasn’t happening. He finally threw up his hands and said something like:

“Well.. the bass is playing up the octave and the low end disappears half the time. You can’t bring the thunder if the bass player is in the wrong octave!”

I sheepishly announced that since I love the sound of the bass high on the neck, that I had encouraged (read: directed) Dana to play it as such. Score one more for Chad, superproducer.

We went over to a friend of Stick’s and borrowed a Fender J-Bass, similar to the one Dana used on the record. One of the problems we had faced was that a typical four string’s low note is an E. This song is in the key of D, so that low root note is unavailable, unless you have a five string, or a drop-D tuner on your bass.

So, we just detuned the bottom string. This presented an issue, in that as I attempted to recut the part, the intervals were all out of whack if I tried to move to another string, and I’m just not a good enough bass player to make the mental transitions on the fly.

So, what you’ll hear on the final mix / master is this: Dana works his magic on everything except the bridge section, from the downbeat at 2:49 to where the band goes back into a straight groove at 3:43. In that bridge section, you hear me, playing that line on one string, like I’m in a Jr. High garage band. Rawk, baby.

Here’s the final mix, with the new bass part in place:

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As always, the mastering job did wonders to bring it to life. Keep in mind, as always, that the mastering is just the manipulation of the two channel mix. They do nothing other then apply final compression, limiting, and EQ. But man… what a difference it makes.

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In many ways, this song is the counter balance to the song we talked about previously, “The Tempest.” In fact, for about 10 minutes, we seriously considered calling the record “Tempest and Tide,” but then we went back to “Mixing Metaphors,” as we felt like it more accurately and interestingly described the record.

If you’ve actually read and listened all the way through this 2553 word epic, I salute and thank you. The record is actually done, and we get to pick up the copies this week. We’re looking forward to sharing it with you all.