13th
Guitar Test
One of the hardest things for me when I started recording was breaking the two-minute mark. I remember I had a series of songs that for some reason always hovered around 1:30-1:59 but never quite made it to two minutes. Well it turns out the reason is that most songs are really an ensemble of several ideas with well executed transitions. Most of my songs were just one idea iterated. I never really bothered to borrow existing compositional strategies to break this barrier. The classic “verse/chorus, verse/chorus middle 8, verse/chorus” structure of just about every 50s and 60s pop song, for example, would have helped me immensely.
But I could rarely think in these terms. Often I started a series of chords, a simple riff, or a cool sound and worked organically from there. A lot of my early songs were essentially fragments that were never assembled into something better, longer, or more interesting. Nowadays it is easier for me to think of a song as moving from a different textured place to another to break this compositional/mental barrier, but every once and a while I still make little songs.
This is one of my favorites. It started with a pretty dull chord progression (on the faux electric piano) and this drum loop I found in Garage Band. Things got interesting after Cayce layered on this Vangelis-inspired synth lead on top. The structure for the song actually came from the lead. I had Cayce record probably five minutes of her soloing and took the best parts. I noticed about halfway through one take, the lead takes this dramatic shift and slows down (around 30 seconds). I loved it and decided we’d break around then and then build the song back up from there quickly. I whipped up a bassline, added more drums (I like the ride cymbal during the breakdown), and some pads in the background and there you have it - another wonderful sub-2 minute song-fragment. I don’t know why we called it “guitar test”.
