Back in the Saddle

From now on, all the titles of my entries here will be Aerosmith songs.

I can't wait for Dude Looks Like a Lady.

Actually, what's back in the saddle is the juggernaut known as Burn Rome Burn. After a quiet month or so, we've begun making noise again, as witnessed by rehearsals last night and the night before. After brushing away some cobwebs, we worked on some of the boatload of new material that's been pieced together over the last few months.

We finally finished arranging the song Bright Dark Times, a song we started working on months ago. In the end, the arrangement hinged on one of Aoife's violin lines buttressed (hunh hunh, I said "butt") by a rhythmic variation by Doc. The whole process was a nice little example of how far we've come in terms of arranging and writing as a group. We've been trying to come up with a way to end BDT for awhile and were collectively stuck in the idea that we should find a way to come back to the beginning, to end with a variation based on the start of the song.

This resulted in a lot of ideas, but nothing that struck any of us as being all that interesting. In fact, most of it was pretty bad. Think jazz-hands-bad. So when Barret left our rehearsal studio to take a call, Aoife, Doc and I kept working. Doc came up with the idea of changing our focus from the beginning of the song to the chorus. He and I tried some variations of the chorus and he finally hit upon the simple idea of playing the chords from the chorus, but for half as long, known in musical parlance as "double time."

On top of this, Aoife transplanted her violin line from the bridge, and suddenly we had exactly what we were looking for: an ending which was new but also connected to the rest of the song, in fact, connected to both the chorus and the bridge. Barret came back in, and we spent a few minutes trying further variations before we locked into a nice concise 10 bar "outro." Good times.

Even better, we then went on and banged out (I said "bang") the maiden (... nevermind) version of Atlantis. Atlantis turned out to be yet another measure of where we are as a band. I wrote this song with the idea of staying as simple and direct as possible. It's really a three chord song with a modulation. No bridge, just 3 verses and choruses. I started playing the verse groove, and Barret and Doc immediately locked into what can only be described as a deep pocket. Just thunderous. By the time we ran the tune for the third time, we could have played it live. Everybody just dialed it in. We all realized right off the bat that the simpler we played the song, the better it would sound.

Almost like a Tom Petty or Cracker tune. If our next project is going to be about recording songs in a quick, live fashion... Atlantis is the perfect candidate. Because of scheduling, we can't practice this weekend, which is a bit of a bummer. As we walked out, everyone seemed re-energized, especially with the prospect of working on more new tunes.

You could even say we were all... "Pump" ed. Get it?

jbg