Today I find myself in Shropshire, on the Welsh border. I might actually be in Wales right now, I’m not entirely sure…
Our second recording session with Francis Dunnery has started today. Remco won’t get here till tomorrow evening, so for now it’s just Francis and me. Francis and I have spoken to each other several times on Skype over the last two months about how to proceed, but you never actually know how things work until you are in that studio.
When we got into the studio last time, we thought we had a clear idea of what we were going to do. But in reality so many things changed and so many things were created in that time that we managed to end up with more songs than we started with. I still don’t know how that happened… We managed to come up with arrangements for almost all of them, alter some of the lyrics and record some lead and backing vocals. Even though we have recorded a melody for most of the songs, I felt the vocals could still improve a lot. Francis and I weren’t done experimenting with the sound yet. On the last day, I realized we had completely forgotten to record ‘Golden Days’, the song we had started the recording session with. To make matters worse, I was still rewriting another song that had a new arrangement. I had already rewritten the lyrics several times before we got into the studio and was now doing it again, to no avail. I was stuck, and my attempts at home didn’t work out well: I couldn’t write a story for it…
Today, Francis wanted to start with something new, so he asked what we hadn’t recorded last time. I told him it was Golden Days, and a middle part for another song. He then looked at me, asking ‘was that all?’ I told him there was this other song, but that it still had no lyrics and that we basically had decided to leave the song alone. Stubborn as he is, he decided he wanted to hear it anyway, and then decided we would write the lyrics together. The process was roughly this:
1: Francis blurts out random words while the music is playing
2: I write down the words I like
3: We build a sentence with those words
4: Francis asks me to replace half the words in the sentence with something more poetic (“give me a Leo line!”)
5: I blurt out something that may or may not resemble the original sentence but does contain a lot of flowers, butterflies and fairies
6: Francis repeats it, followed by “That’s great, I love it!”
7: We now have a completely new sentence
After we had written about 70% of the lyrics, we decided to play around with my voice and see if we could find the right tone for the song. I have spoken the words, yelled them, sang them ‘like they would on Broadway’, with a German accent and like a gospel singer until we found something that we felt suited the song. Francis and I have been talking a lot about finding the right tone lately, and this was the one he was after. It might o=not work everywhere, but it is definitely an addition to my vocal vocabulary.
Next up was ‘Golden Days’, for which we still had to record all the vocals too. We came up with some backing vocals, and tried some of that same tone we had just found in the previous song, and again it seems to work quite well!
If I write it down like this it all actually sounds quite easy to do, but I have had a very tough day. Working with Francis (who is pushing me till he knows for sure I have reached my limit) is exhausting, and I mean that in the best possible way; it’s what’s needed to make this a great record, and different to anything I’ve ever done before. I am now so tired I’m struggling to find words; I am physically (vocally) and emotionally drained, and I just hope a good night’s sleep will make me recover enough to allow me to sing the notes I struggled with tonight.
So now I’m all alone in a cottage in either England or Wales, and I hope this blog at least makes some kind of sense. If not, at least it shows my current state of mind…
