this part was fun for me to make, although i doubt many people will appreciate it, which is understandable since there's not much to appreciate.

if you listen closely to the right channel you can hear nick (who played the solo guitar and the guitar that sounds like an organ at the end, who did most of the equipment operating, and in whose family's house the song was recorded) counting off for glenn.

originally it was in both the left and right channels, but i decided that it would more cool in a pink floyd way or something if it were in only one channel. i put it in the right channel because for the rest of the stereo stuff i'd used left as the basis for whatever thing i was doing.

the main guitar track was one of the noisiest ones for some reason, and i couldn't have noisy in just the right channel, so i had to get some noise going on in the left channel, too, so it wouldn't sound unbalanced or anything. i took the noises from the right track from before nick's countoff, chopped them up, reversed parts, and put them back together. turn it up, it's fun.

on the day we finally wrapped this song up my face was unshaven. you can hear me rub it; that was inspired by bob hoskins' fine performance as eddie valiant in "who framed roger rabbit?".

(the truly astute will note here that i am also giving a nod here to gene wolfe. m4d props to those who can say why.)

i probably should have redone the "*inhale* dawn." vocal, since it has some pretty bad proximity effect, but i hadn't noticed it till i'd gotten home. whoops.

glenn and colin played the same parts straight through the whole song. glenn played the guitar; he said he messed up in the take we ended up using. everyone else thought he was just adding variety to stave off boredom. oh, well. colin played the bass; he got it right in one take. we were all very proud of him.

i have a whole lot of respect for glenn and colin for the effort it took to play the same phrases for almost six minutes. doggies.

this was entirely nick's doing. i'm pretty sure it's guitar. i thought he was doing something else when we recorded this. when i got home i thought, this is really cool, and i kept it.

i spread it between the left and right channels and messed with each channel's volume envelope to kind of give some subtle variety to the stereo field. it must have worked, since i can't really tell anything is going on when i listen to it.

brian did almost as many takes for his drums as i did for my vocals. probably more, when you consider that his takes lasted for the whole song, whereas i had lots of downtime in mine.

brian accompanied me for my first public performance; i hadn't planned to have anyone backing me, but when i mentioned that to him he volunteered his services. the recordings aren't very good, and i messed up majorly on the last song in the set, but people said i'd rocked, so i guess it wasn't so bad.

(actually, i had had a band with me; it fell through because my solo guitar wasn't allowed to attend. that's another story, though.)

this was made from a reverb tail on a guitar. ... not much more to say, i guess.

i wrote these lyrics after my class' graduation all-night lock-in party ... thing. it was kind of dumb. despite that i felt pretty melancholy when i'd gotten back home, so i thought, dude, rare circumstances (graduation), major emotions (for me, anyway), and an altered state of consciousness (i don't normally stay up for twenty-four-hour-plus stretches) -- time to write something!

i got a bottle of bawls (really pretty blue bottles with raised dots on them; not too sugary, either, although i still prefer fresca. too bad fresca has aspartame. sigh.) and sat down in a comfortable chair in the basement with a notebook and a pencil (i'm not sure why i didn't use a pen) and started writing.

four songs (words for songs, anyway) came out of that. i decided that it would be dumb to change the words after the fact, when i'd be in a more awake state of mind, so that's why the song repeats. ("*inhale* dawn." was actually written as part of the lyrics. i am so bizarre.)

this song is probably the least naked (but most emotional) of the four, which would be why i chose to use it.

ouch. the lead vocals on this song are pretty technically bad. i should have rerecorded them (again), but i called it quits after this take. i rationalize that decision by saying that it's an emotional song, so the vocals should be affected.

whatever, homer.

everybody else there said the vocals sounded great.

i won't note the rest of the errors; you can hear them for yourself, and there'd be notes everywhere.

the backup vocals are better than the lead vocals. probably because i did them after the lead vocals and had loosened up or something. also probably because they were a lot simpler. and closer to my speaking voice's range.

they also go off pitch a tad (more apparent when listening to them without the rest of the song), but since they sound good with the lead vocals, i'm guessing that i was following the lead. that i was, in fact, following the lead lends a great deal of credence to that supposition.

glenn thought i should keep the pitch-going-up thing, so i did.

i think these are the song's best lines.

to sort of mask the bad pitch on the sustained note of "break" i added an echo. i'd already wanted to add the echo, but, uh, yeah.

nick did the solos. glenn was going to, too, but when it came time to record them we decided that it sounded good without any more.

the "mor" of "this morning" clipped. again, i didn't catch it till i'd gotten home. i used audacity's pencil function to round off the waves; it sort of helped. i also lowered the volume on that syllable. it still kind of jars my ears when i hear it, but it's probably as good as it's gonna get.

i cut up the first solo and had fun rearranging the pieces. i'd wanted to have a bit of soloage underneath the vocals at some point, but at recording time i forgot.

i also used some guitar stuff at 0:25 for the pad thing.

the original solo starts at 2:45, in case anyone can't tell.

in the initially jamming out of this song, nick did that harmony. it was his idea to get the quick ~of the new day~ going against the drawn-out ~of the new day~.

i love this noise. nick made it on his guitar during out initial jamming out of this song, and i yelled, dude, that's awesome. keep that in the song. it like, fits the mood and everything.

i'm not sure why exactly i said that it fits the mood, but i guess it must since i did.

i think i should have upped the volume on these vocals right here, because it sounds like they're being swallowed up by the room, as it were. i guess that's sort of symbolic. i know at least one finnard who'd tell me to just say i meant to do that.

we had planned to have some soloing going on here, but decided it sounded fine. i like it, it's got this kind of conceptual silence thing going on, except not really silent.

nick was playing with the song one night in between recording sessions and recorded this part. i am so glad he did, it rocks.

we used the door to the control room; it had a louder creak. bad decision in retrospect, since the control room was noisy.

they laughed at my insistence on including the creak. who is laughing now?