Drinks Are On Black And Blue

This past weekend, Bill and I put the finishing touches on the long-since-percolating "Drinks Are On Me", a song written long ago, and performed only slightly less long ago for the last time.

Bill and I laid down the first few tracks for this many months ago. I want to say sometime mid last year. We had drums, vocals, and a few guitar tracks. The only thing that remained was drums and piano. Which is sort of like saying the only thing that remains in my plans to get remarried is finding a girl.

So the other day, Bill and I hit the garage running.

Actually, I take that back. I'm telling the story out of sequence. We first went to Guitar Center to check out some bass gutiars. I personally prefer to shop at Sam Ashe, just because they don't have that "Corporate bohemoth" feeling to them, and we all know how much corporate rock sucks. Right Zybul? sorry, inside joke. Anyhow, I personally have had great experience with Sam Ashe, and even better experiences with mom and pop music stores (or pop and sons, in some cases) so I'm happy to see my money go there. We tooled around with bass guitars for a while, with my opinion resting solidly on the belief that a 200 dollar bass "will be just fine", to quote VA Stryker during the recording of the My New Invention single. Bill is convinced that a mid-tier, 500+ bass is better. I will leave this one in the hands of the pros, as I have no dog in that fight. If Bill wants to buy a "nice" bass instead of a bare bones one, that's cool and I will sign off on that. Not trying to be snarky either. I mean I will actually support it, because I admit that I do not have the insight.

We also looked at some microphones, as we are hatching a plot to put together a more stable recording environment, which was kind of the long term goal of the project. The main idea is that we currently spend WAY too much time dorking around getting SET UP to record, which takes away from actual recording time. Even switching between instruments takes way too much time. So the idea is that everything is already in place when you walk into the garage. Er, I mean recording studio. So when you walk in, all you hafta do is power up, sit down, and rock. By our estimates, there are two missing components to that strategy. A dedicated microphone system for drums, and a dedicated computer for the studio. The new bass guitar is simply part of the "Get instruments that don't suck" strategy, which is decoupled from the other strategy I'm currently discussing.

So we looked at microphones, and discovered a very well priced set that is intended for mic'ing drums. That may be the one we go with. Which would be just fine with me.

We then went to costco to check out desktop computers. I'm absolutely convinced that an entry level desktop computer will more than satisfy our needs for the recording studio. I don't think Bill is convinced though. Sadly, Costco was closed as it was Easter. Whatever.

SOMEWHERE in between us leaving Bill's house and our return, a big 7.2 earthquake struck Mexicali, though somehow both Bill and I totally missed it. I'm not sure how that really happens, but it did. Neither of us felt it, though his entire family did. It's not as if it wasn't felt in that area. It was. We just didn't feel it. I have to believe we were in the car at the time, and just assumed it was engine weirdness or something.

After ALL THAT, that's when we went into the garage and started working on the song.

Bass line was first, and despite my efforts to convince Bill that "less is more", he put down a bass line that I felt was a bit too "deedle" heavy. Now I'm not telling tales out of school here, and I know that bill won't read this and say "oh, so NOW he's bustin' my chops for it!!!!!". No dear readers, there was plenty of chop busting "en suite" that day, so fear not. I'm not going to belabor the point, because it just doesn't matter, but I felt that there was already a lot going on in the song, and yet another instrument doing "solo" like riffs seemed out of place. TO add insult to injury, Bill took the same approach with the keyboard!!!! LOL. so now we have three guitar tracks, a bass track and a piano track, all of which are essentially playing a "lead" riff. Too funny. Again, not trying to bust chops, just reporting events as they happened. Bill and I talked about it, and I think we just disagreed. Back to my "no dog in this fight" comment I made earlier, I guess I felt the same way about this song. Though I think it's a good song, it's not worth making a big stink over and bruising frayed nerves. I trust Bill as a musician, and his instincts are good for stuff like this. So even though I think differently, I'm willing to defer to whatever thoughts are going through Bill's heads.

See? How's that for a nice little bit of diplomacy to wrap up what was turning into a smack-down of a write up????

It was then my turn to work my cubase magic. I went into the song and doctored up the parts that were a tad out of sync. I removed a few little errors, cleaned up some junk, and just cleared up the timing on a few hits. Just techinical stuff that the casual listener probably would not have noticed.

We tweaked some knobs and settings for a bit, then output an MP3 for our listening pleasure. And that was about the end of that. I have all the cubase files on a flash drive, and plan on giving it some more attention when I get back to Ohio, but I would say for the most part, this song is finished.

In retrospect, after listening to it, I am beginning to feel that this is one of those songs whose value lies not in it's essential goodness, but instead in its nostalgia. The performances are solid, and it makes me smile, but I'm not convinced it's a good song. It goes on about 2 minutes too long, with lyrics that aren't clever enough to be worth waiting for. There's also pretty much no sense of variety in the music, without a solo or middle 8 to speak of. Naturally, not every song requires that, especially when the narrative of the song is compelling enough to hold the listeners interst throughout. I just don't feel like this song has that. I will listen to it a few more times to try to be a little more disconnected from it, but I think out of ALL of the songs we have slated to go on the album, this would be my first choice to cut and release as a web special. Maybe I will try cutting out two verses and bringing it down to three and a half minutes or something. Not sure.

Anyhow, with all of that said, I don't want readers to think for one second that it was not a whole ton of fun putting this thing together and getting it done. It's one that has been on deck for ten or more years now, and it's really rewarding to see a studio quality version of it finally finished. The whole experience also got me re-pumped for recording more songs.

Ok, that's all I've got for now. carry on, true believers!