The Sunday Song: New Year’s Song/1990
I wrote this in 1994. We were living in Alabama at the time, while we went to grad school. A lot of the stuff I was writing back then was kind of like “short stories as songs,” very under the influence of folkies like Bill Morrissey; this song in particular is one of those.
Needless to say, it’s entirely fictional; I was seven years old in 1978. 🙂 It’s supposed to be a tale told from the point of view of a man on New Year’s Eve in 1990, looking back at 1978 and looking at where his life is on that day.
– download “New Year’s Song/1990” (mp3)
This was one of the tracks of an album called “The Land of Red Barns,” all of which had that short story vibe, pretty much. I have never recorded decent versions of most of them, and I am making it a project to get all the couple hundred songs I have written recorded and maybe even out there somewhere, so here’s this one.
Music geek stuff from here forward…:
The AT4033 for an ambient mic, towards the back of the room. Main vocals on the ATM41HE, and a Digital Reference instrument mic pointed at the guitar (the Blueridge jumbo cutaway). Guitar and vocals were recorded simultaneously to a drum loop used as a click track. The female vocal is actually my voice through the DigiTech Vocalist Live 4, recorded as an overdub. I also overdubbed the violin (played on the keyboard… couldn’t get my MIDI guitar to work for some reason!) and a bass part.
Haven’t gotten around to EQ’ing it or mixing it really, just tossed a bit of reverb on it here and there and panned the tracks. I did it all last night, and I really should re-do the main vocal independent of the guitar, too, so I can actually pay attention to the notes I am hitting. 🙂 It’s been years since I played this one.
Lyrics & chords below. The “A add E” is x07650 in tablature. I also play the F#7 as xx4320, but all the other chords are basically open, no barres up the neck or anything. It’s fingerpicked, of course.
It was in the summer 1978 Bm A
I met her taking the pup to the Hatfield vet Bm A
It was raining outside and we both were wet Bm A
Her arms crossed on a plaid flannel shirt E G
Legs crossed under a denim skirt E G
She was reading Tolkien and tore a page E G
I wrote my number on the scrap and gave it back C C7 F#7 AaddE
And it’s been a dozen years, been a dozen years Bm A E Bm A E
Funny how time moves slow A F#7 A F#7
It takes forever for faith to grow A F#7 A Fmaj7
Here’s the indentation, this finger, this hand C G
This is where I wear my wedding band E
We hiked around campus in ’78
Disco tunes played on acoustic guitars
The U Mass quad, the dog, frisbees and fires
We held hands to watch Mideast news
Kissed over the gearshift in a VW
Got our diplomas and made love to the moon
Traded mortarboard caps and laughed
When mine slipped and hit her nose
Chorus
Taking the dog out for a midnight walk
We used to snowmobile along this snow
Been a dozen years with no kids to show
Dog’s feeling the ice in her bones
And maybe I am too and the Hatfield whores
Won’t get their 20 bucks from me no more
Chorus
It was in the summer 1978
Met her taking the pup to the Hatfield vet
3 Responses to “The Sunday Song: New Year’s Song/1990”
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Thanks! Glad to see you are keeping at this. Good lyrics. I like the picking pattern.
A copy of Melodyne could be helpful for building vocals if you’re after precision. a) you can take a scratch track, process it, then play with the notes until you’re totally happy with the melody. b) take that version and learn it then record the version you learned from yourself. This will save your voice from getting exhausted and let you be focused on composing and recording in separate sessions. Don’t let authenticity be a demon anymore than you’d want to handcode machine code. Recording is composition. Also, you can use the track you finalize on to build other vocals, experiment with harmonies, etc. A Vocalist isn’t nearly as flexible for composing even if an excellent tool.
Here is what I was working on this past month.
http://youtu.be/KQ5sUIOIwm4
I wrote it for a praise band so this is MOR with other performers in mind. It’s parrothead music but me luvs a bossa/calypso feel. I performed it acoustically the week of the tornados because we had no electrical power for that service, then we did it live with the praise band and solo for traditional. Because they have me playing piano (a real stretch for me), I decided to record this in Sibelius. Another group is asking for it and I needed the score to send to them.
Live recording to produce print notation is quite tedious for reasons we both know well, but combining it with scored parts that I write in (the steel drums, marimba, bass) and copy (the drums) proves to be productive as at the end I have the complete notated score from which I can then create the recorded version and it helps for cleaning up, focusing the parts, improvements, etc. For online sales work in the choral market, this is absolutely required. The people buying it are very selective and quite critical as most are trained church musicians and many are also composers who direct choirs, youth groups, etc.
I wrote in the first melody, scored harmonies, rendered those out as horns, recorded all of that, then added the vocals and guitar work the old fashioned way (Godin nylon), then put the vocals in melodyne and reworked it back to the scored parts. Most of us are unaware how far off pitch we are, when we are singing semi-tones that aren’t there and so on. So this exercise cleans up the analog flesh mess and then I have a recorded version that comes close to the printed sheet music both of which one needs for that market. Once I have the tracks, then I can listen, do some judicious pruning of the wav tracks, then factor that back into the score. Making the video is mostly a lark in Sony Vegas but necessary these days as an indie, in my opinion. I’m very surprised at the downloads for the male soprano version of Ave Maria. Still using Adobe Audition for recording. The church loaned me an Alesis for performing on keyboard. I’ll never be more than a chord pounder but hey, rock ‘n roll doesn’t need appreciation societies to keep it alive. 🙂
As to subject matter, the Old Testament is a much bigger market. The folks who want this want it for a Yom Kippur service and that delights me to no end.
Yeah, I know the Vocalist isn’t ideal, but Melodyne doesn’t work in my host. Started contemplating changing hosts this weekend actually, but the thought of managing to import everything I have done over the years just gave me the willies. 🙁
You got that right. I stick with XP because I’d rather not devolve a working system. Melodyne isn’t ideal as it doesn’t play well with Audition and says so right on the web page. On the other hand, it edits waves like midi and even spits midi out of waves which is sorta cool. I can export a melody as a midi and reuse that for doubling, etc. If it would read midi and let me line up the waves, that would be excellent too.
I let a host disk die and take ten years of work with it. Disk Doctor to the rescue but trying to put it all back together without the directories was too much to contemplate. No free lunch. Still, we can do so much with this tech by ourselves that we couldn’t do without a room of gear and snarky musicians, it’s worth the risks.
I guess we could take up sailing and pour money into a hole in the water. 🙂