Did I say that? Hope I did.

By the time I was settling on the song ideas I wanted to pursue for lyric writing, I had been living with the thirty-something instrumental loops I'd created for a few months. This album is the slowest I've ever worked, not in terms of how long I'm taking to do the work but in terms of how long I had to wait in between steps. I had other projects eat up good chunks of my time, notably a high budget record that I made with Good for Grapes (the band I play in), working with producer Howard Redekopp. 

It was interesting doing rehearsals and pre-production with him; his advice mostly concerned song structure and consisted of finding ways to play the nicest-sounding parts of the songs more times. Tracking parts was long and frustrating at times. I played the violin and trombone on the record and my parts came fairly late in the overdubs, so there were times when the pitch of the violin especially would never quite sound perfect because it was being pulled in so many directions by the pitches of instruments already recorded. Not to mention that I was discouraged from using vibrato, which made pitch even more crucial. I had a tuner with me, so I was able to check what I was being asked to do against concert pitch when it got particularly tricky. Specific notes had to be played a quarter-tone sharp or flat. It was tough to remember how to detune myself correctly over the course of a long line, but I tried my best!

The experience was interesting though, and listening to the finished product I really noticed how everything we recorded was more or less there, but volume was really used as a means of highlighting the important parts. The violin was mostly single-tracked, which I guess is true to how it sounds live. I'm used to the sound of ensemble strings on my own stuff, but I could see getting into single-tracking them at some point.

I think the time off between the various steps of making this album was helpful, since it allowed me time to come back to ideas and sounds and be more big-pictures and objective about them. The downside is the enthusiasm that comes with pursuing a new and exciting thing has also cooled, which means getting back into the flow of working on the songs takes a bit of doing. When I came back to my loops to start writing songs over them, I had been listening to them for a while and shown them to some people, so I knew which ones I was most excited to work on.

The first thing I tried to do was imagine the sort of imagery and mood I might use for a specific song idea, and then try to pair it with a loop that I thought complimented that in some way. Some pairings came easier than others. I generally started with the ideas I was most excited by and then got a little more stuck by the end. There were quite a few instrumental loops I thought I could write good songs over, maybe 15 or 16. I wanted to end up with about 10 songs in the end, so I figured that would give me plenty to pare the album down to something with a cohesive sound and theme.

I enlisted the help of a few friends to listen to my loops and tell me which they liked. It was helpful in that I felt validated when they liked ones that I did too, but it was hard for them to tell me which ones really went together as a group. They could give me some adjectives to describe the mood of the loops though, and that helped me. I had angles of attack in my head for some but not all of my song ideas at this point. I knew, for instance, that I wanted my song about the dangers of unilateral decision-making on climate change to be a first person narrative story song with an anxious sense of impending doom. I chose to pair that with the idea I'd based on a song I'd recorded live at the Fox Cabaret, thinking that I could contrast the hedonism of a club night with the sober but equally reckless decision-making of some Catch 22-ish government/military types. I knew I wanted the song about the next evolutionary leap forward being someone we'd consider handicapped today to be a triumphant fanfare of themed, disjointed imagery. So I picked a major chord guitar loop with horns and strings, all swagger and strength. These choices were just hunches that I would try and make work, and when some of them didn't end up clicking, I either ditched both parts or tried a different song idea with the same loop. So the ones that worked out were really just lucky.

Before I started trying to write lyrics, I spent a bit more time mixing the loops and seeing if there was anything else I could add. Then I printed five-minute versions of the loops just repeating over and over so that I could put them on my iPod and walk and bike around with them. They weren't sequenced, so it was just everything going at once, like it would be at the song's most intense parts, but it was a good way of getting myself to listen to them with my song ideas in mind. Since they were just the same 5-20 second chunks over and over, my brain would get hypnotized and bored enough while listening to them that ideas of how to tackle the song subjects or just images would pop into my mind. I found this worked especially well when I paired doing it with repetitive physical activity like riding my bike into Vancouver (while I was going to the studio to record with Good for Grapes, in fact!).

I conceived of the rest of the song ideas on the album this way. Instead of having a pre-made idea and finding an instrumental for it, I just listened to the instrumental until an idea for a song formed out of it. So I worked both ways on this album. Music came first, but was then set aside while research that would lead to song ideas took place. Then these two bodies of work that had been growing separately were forced together, and each informed the other. I like the freedom to do instrumental loops before thinking about lyrics at all, but for my next project I'd like to have some more early interaction between lyrics and music. That might mean starting more of my instrumentals with vocal melodies; I only did that once on this album. But it was that one vocal melody that made me want to do the album in the first place.