Month: August 2011

I’m a sucker for songs with choirs.

Seriously, it’s like crack to me. I think I can probably blame my parents for this one quite successfully: my dad has always sung in the local church choir, and my mother introduced us all to the wonderful songwriter Melanie, and this song in particular:

It can seem cliché to throw in a choir for some extra emotion, but there’s something really rousing about a group of different voices coming together as one. The combination of all those different vocal timbres creates something very special indeed. Even if they’re just singing in unison, there’s so much power in a group of voices.

I’ve been in choirs since I was really young, and have a major soft spot for choral music as a result. Last year I was conducting a choir for the first time properly – previously I’d set up a mini choir for an amateur production of Sister Act that I arranged all the music for. That’s a long story for another time. But, it was my first experience of properly arranging music for a group of other people to sing, and I was completely hooked. I think I arranged about half of the material I got the NUIG choir to sing last year – stuff that varied from Elvis songs to Swedish folksongs.

Speaking of Swedish music, one of my favourite guilty pleasure songs with choirs is by the Swedish band The Ark, who some people probably remember mostly for their Eurovision entry in 2007. However, I remember them mostly for a Swedish friend of mine who was rather obsessed with them and introduced me to their music. This particular song is one that has stayed with me since, mostly for the choir entry in it. The song itself is pretty straight forward and quite emo lyrically, but the interplay between the choir and the lead singer in the last section of the song is absolutely stellar.

And I must take a moment to thank @donalmulligan, who reminded me of this great track that I first heard on the Pet Shop Boys “Back To Mine” compilation. Incidentally, you may also have heard it recently on the Channel 4 show “Sirens”, which I recommend watching btw. I lost that PSB compilation in the Great Hard Drive Crash of 2011, but I’m glad that youtube is there so I can still find these tracks to listen to. Try not to dance in your seat as you listen to it.

I had a playlist on my old iTunes that was dedicated to “Choral Awesomeness”, as I put it, but alas it’s something I’ll have to rebuild from scratch again now. Not all the selections had such bombastic choirs – some were more serene, like Kate Bush’s “Hello Earth” which quotes the Georgian folk song “Tsintsharo”, featured in the Werner Herzog film “Nosferatu”. Or Thea Gilmore’s amazing “Sol Invictus”, which quickly became one of my favourite midwinter songs ever. I’ve also previously posted about one of my favourite choirs, Scala, who do gorgeous choral versions of popular music.

But it seems pretty obvious that the love of choral music, and the years spent either singing in or conducting choirs, would have some effect on the kind of music that I write. That certainly does seem to be the case, listening back to the mixes. I realised that I have 10-part harmony at one point in one of the songs, and there’s a definite choral feel to that particular song. However, it’s definitely a different thing to be layering up different vocal lines with your own voice, and working with a choir. Maybe I’ll put together a little choral group to sing live with me so I can really get those vocal textures live that are on the record.

Inspiration: Joni Mitchell

This is one of my favourite Joni Mitchell songs, and I stumbled across this live version from 1970 on youtube today while searching out more performances from this BBC In Concert series.

The entire concert is collected here, if you fancy losing yourself to some wonderful live solo performances from a talented songwriter on the cusp of the greatest period of her career. This would have been in the period just after Ladies Of The Canyon, while writing songs that would appear on Blue.

There’s a great early version of “All I Want” in that show too, while it was still being written, which I recommend checking out, if only to compare it to the version that is so well known and loved on the album. In fact, that song was the reason for a spur of the moment road trip across the country one year for me. My ex was visiting, and we went for a hangover breakfast with a friend, and afterwards, this song came on in my CD player in the car, and we decided that my ex wouldn’t get a bus back to Cork, but that we’d all just keep on driving and listening to my Joni CDs and sing along. Now, every time I hear that riff starting on the dulcimer, I think of the road to Cork, and it makes me smile a lot.

Studio Days: mixing days

I realise I’ve not posted any photos of myself from the studio days, but then Charthouse Studios themselves posted some shots of me today. So, thank you Ian, for taking some photos of me pretending to play the piano. I’m sure it looks dead natural. These were actually from the last day that I was tracking piano and vocals for the record.

studio daysstudio days

I’m back in the studio next week for a final day to fix the little niggly things that aren’t quite right with the mixes just yet. The mixing days were long, but were really interesting to be honest. It brought so much clarity to what we had tracked, and really cleaned up the tracks so much by refining and shaping the songs to sound the way they should. We covered a lot of ground in a very short space of time, but really, it’s still a record being made on a very tight budget, so that’s to be expected. That said, I’m really pleased with how it has been turning out and I can’t wait until it is all finished and I’m able to share it with people. It definitely has been the best use of my summer possible.

Death of a hard drive

Never the most enjoyable experience, but that is indeed what happened, and my backups weren’t as often as they should have been, so I’ve lost a bucket load of stuff, and I’m currently filling my lovely empty new hard disc up again. I had a lovely moment when the first album I added to my iTunes was the mixes of my own record. That was rather deadly, I gotta say.

But I’ve kinda made a half assed attempt at putting my iTunes music collection back together, as I’ve realised how little I listen to music on my computer anymore. I stick on Lyric FM, or play a vinyl record these days more than finding something on iTunes. I listen to CDs in my car, so for the last year or so, iTunes has been a way to do up mix CDs for the car, and that’s about it. I don’t think I’ll attempt to have the huge bloated music library I used to have, but instead, I’m gonna use this rebirth of my computer to be a bit more careful about what music I have on there, and maybe I’ll find myself actually listening to music on my computer again if I have to hit the skip button less often and value the music that I put on there more too.

This iMac has previously had a dead logic board within the first few weeks of me buying it, and was already named Jean Grey as a result of its miraculous rise from the dead that time. I guess the name is still pretty apt. I had a desktop of Jean as Phoenix for a long time. I guess it’s time I went with that again, or is that tempting fate?

Studio Days: week 6

The last little pieces of the recording plan fell into place this week, as I got a double bass player, and some of the additional vocalists into the studio. I’m spending a few days not listening to anything now, so I can go back with fresh ears and hear what I’ve done over the 11 days in total that I spent tracking in the studio. Perhaps fresh ears will point out something I need on a track that I’d not previously planned on, or thought of, or will pick out something that was recorded that maybe doesn’t work or fit as well as I thought it would. Regardless, I’m taking a break from it all, and listening to other music that I love.

Meadhbh was up on Tuesday to do her parts for me and even managed to remind me of a harmony part that I’d completely forgotten which she had demo’d for me nearly three years ago. I also added her voice into the mix where I’d been building up a choral texture of my own voice. I wanted an additional vocal timbre in the mix to better clarify some of the lines and to highlight some of the detail in the arrangements that I thought were getting a bit lost with just one multi-tracked voice.

Later that afternoon, some of the :fund:it backing singers landed in to track their parts. There had been a few cancellations over the previous weekend, but at that stage the studio time had been arranged and worked around all the dates and times that had been sent to me. It’s a pity that some people had to cancel last minute, but those who arrived and sang had a great time in the studio. I made a last minute change to what I wanted them to sing on one of the tracks, and wasn’t fully sure myself if it would work on the song or not, but the part sounds really wonderful and makes me smile so much. They got to see the studio, and have a look around the control room. Tracking some parts for a second track they really got to see how some parts are put together in the studio, and see how I put together some of the vocal arrangements.

On Wednesday George was in the studio to add double bass parts on some of the tracks. Damn, but that is a sexy instrument. It really helped add some more depth to the tracks it was on. Prior to this, the only bass notes have been from the piano parts, and I wouldn’t say my left hand is my strongest to be perfectly honest.

One of my favourite things about this whole process has been hearing what other musicians have brought to the songs – I’ve had ideas, or parts, or rough notions of what I wanted, and seeing how they interpreted all that was nerve wracking and exciting at the same time. Sometimes frustrating too, but always rewarding in the end. At times it was just sheer great fun.

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