The Sunday Song: The Sculptor
There’s only one CD sitting over there on the sidebar, but I have a couple hundred songs sitting around, of varying quality, most of which never got decently recorded. Back when I lived in Alabama, I used to record onto a Walkman using the built-in mic. We didn’t have much money. 🙂 I still have those tracks. They sound awful.
The thing about looking back at old songs is that you can see where I was trying out new things; new tunings, new chords, new styles. In a lot of ways it’s a mix of more derivative and more adventurous than what I would write today.
I wrote this back in 1992 or so, and re-recorded it yesterday. At two hours per to do it nicely, I have months of work to do to re-record all of them. But it’s fun to revisit these old friends, and think about the times in which they were written.
This is called “The Sculptor” and it is from a cassette tape called Sun & Moon. Lyrics, chords, and recording notes after the break.
The Sculptor
Tuning: Drop D (DADGBE).
D2
Old Adams had granite dust in his veins
E7 A2
Carved dead men’s names in letters a half hand high
D2
He shaped each stroke like angel’s wings
Gmaj7 G D
Every tombstone could fly
He wrote his name on paper every day
Stayed up at night staring at the table
Wondering if the name of Adams could live forever
Wondering if his work was able
D7 Am
Immortality passes us all by, even those in stone
D7 G Em D
But nothing hurts when we know we have flown
So Adams spent hours carving his secret hope
A statue with outstretched hands
He embedded his blood in every angle and slope
He hid his plans
Old Adams passed away you know
They set that statue above his grave
Lovers kissed under it in the snow
But on its base there is no name
Today that statue stands, its features weatherworn
Wind and snow have eroded the marks made in the stone
The cemetery’s been abandoned for a long long time
But children play in Adams’ shadow
Around them all the headstone fly
Nothing hurts, so Adams follows
Today that statue stands, its features weatherworn
Wind and snow have eroded the marks made in the stone
Immortality passes us all by, even those in stone
But nothing hurts when we know we have flown
D
We have flown
Like I said on Facebook, it’s very “folky” — a fair amount of the songs I did back then were like that, very “straight” so to speak. Lots of ballad-style stuff (in the trad sense) with no choruses, lots of story songs.
Some recording notes: it’s got mandolin, guitar, and vocal, and some harmonies on the choruses. I recorded the vocal live with the guitar and used the Vocalist Live to put the harmonies on there (I used the “three up” patch, after trying a few different ones). The guitar and vocal were miked with the condenser from about two feet away, and I used the cardioid as the vocal mic. I close-miked the mandolin with the cardioid but left the condenser where it was.
I did it this way because I have recently rearranged all the cabling and whatnot to get a set up a bit more useful for playing live as well as recording. So now the pedals and stuff are hooked into the recording setup, and I can just turn on the amp to get a live sound whenever I want. Plus, playing the song “live” rather than overdubbing tracks feels more in keeping with these older songs, which were written pretty much as voice-and-guitar pieces, not as band songs, like I started writing later.
3 Responses to “The Sunday Song: The Sculptor”
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Hah, I actually paused Michael Hedges to listen to your song. And then I’m greeted with an intro that could pass as one of his 🙂
I like it!
Did you write down the music/lyrics back when you originally recorded it, or did it all come back to you as you listened to the bad recording? And how faithful to the original is it? 🙂
Oh, I have all the lyrics to all the old songs. I don’t have all the music however. I can usually figure it out.
This is pretty faithful to the original, including the intro. Basically, the original recording sounds a lot like this except I am a better singer after all these years, the guitar playing is a bit more fluid, and the recording doesn’t suck.
I like this lyric. Melancholy but it keeps to the image and doesn’t wander. Good story focus. Flying headstones… I can see why you are a game designer, Raph. Very image focused. Keep ’em coming.
I got this one polished up this weekend. Written for soprano/alto, I decided to record the vocals anyway until I can get it done with female vocals. The strings and woodwinds are Sibelius samples. The guitar work is the Godin nylon. I did put a little bit of mandolin and harmonica to roughen it up.
http://home.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/mp3/Epiphany2.mp3
Derived from the earlier improvised instrumental version, these puppies take way more time than I once put into them. Writing the score has other uses but it is the slow way.