Is it still just an escapade?

Link to buy/stream: https://peteescapologists.bandcamp.com/album/chronicles-of-a-dead-end

Well, here we are.  Today, a musical journey spanning more than half of my life (up to this point, I mean!) comes to a close with the release of Chronicles of a Dead End.  It's free to stream, but the paid download throws in two bonus tracks: faithful recreations of the goofy original "Modern Art" and the "March for the Age" intro to "Escapade".

On finishing Escapade 2 back in 2012, I recall remarking "I'm quite pleased with this" or something to that effect.  I think deep down, I knew I was fooling myself.  In fact, the consensus was that 2 was an even worse experience than the original, probably as a consequence of the way the (relatively!) improved production exposed other aspects of the album's presentation that undermined the material.

It says a lot that, despite Chronicles including basically all the Escapade material in some form, including the (previously) Escapade 2-exclusive stuff, this incarnation of the album trims away so much bloat that it ends up being the shortest version by a significant margin.  Excluding the bonus tracks, Chronicles clocks in at a scant 35:26 - in contrast, Escapade lasts 39:10 and Escapade 2 a hefty 44:47!

Anyway, this time around, while I'm a little nervous after 2's savage reception, I'm also genuinely excited by the performances I've got out of the musicians I worked with.  The thunderous 5-string bass in "Them" particularly stands out to me.  Moreover, the impression I got throughout these sessions was that the artists honestly liked the material and wanted to give it their best.

*

In a final, strange twist of fate, I recently found myself in a situation where I needed to play back MIDI from my family's old Acorn computer.  This necessitated the acquisition of a General MIDI-compatible synthesizer with an old-fashioned 5-pin MIDI input, instead of USB or Bluetooth connectivity.  It seems they don't make those anymore, and I wasn't about to try to figure out what kind of adapter to use, so I ultimately opted to buy a second-hand PSR-5700.  That's right: the instrument that kicked off this story is back.

I wasn't playing.  I was just having adventures in modern (circa 1992, I guess) recording.

Having played with it a bit, I honestly do get why my childhood/adolescent self associated its capabilities with exciting, yet comforting feelings.  But I was also struck by the way that some kinds of music stand up to it better than others - some of the MIDI files I played through it sounded pretty cool, while others sounded so dull that I couldn't finish listening.  The implication is that this, too, might have been not such a dead end, had I trained myself to discern what makes a piece of music sound good filtered through MIDI.  After all, pre-PS2-era (or thereabout) video game composers would have had to do just that!  I probably still could, actually, but the kind of organic, emotional music to which I instinctively gravitate is indeed incompatible with this technology on a fundamental level.

In closing, I'd like to reflect that starting out, I had not the faintest inkling that this project would ultimately lead me back to my classical roots, of all places.  Just because something isn't a dead end, does not necessarily mean that it leads where you think it will!

The final "Escapade" session

We all entered this project knowing a digitally simulated string section was possible.  How about we leave it with something new?  Instead of using a PSR-5700, or a Jupiter-80, we use strings.  Real strings!  A 34-piece orchestra.  Then we'll get not megabytes... but gigabytes.

We've come full circle.

Yes.  That is the thing that required me to keep the length of "Escapade", the song, under 8 minutes (160 bars at this tempo).  Who would have thought that my first time working with an actual, professional orchestra, would be on the 7th and final track of a (re-)remake of an album that, in its original incarnation, was accurately described as "William Shatner + lo-fi + 80s revivalism"?  Not only does this create a suitably big sound space for the album's finale, but it ends this project much as it began - with a musical direction that had previously seemed like a dead end being revealed, in fact, to be not so.

15 years, or is it 18?

This month, July 2024, marks 15 years since I recorded and released the original "Modern Art", goofy synthesizers and all, which I consider officially the first act of the Escapades saga.

In fact the story could be said to have begun some three years earlier, as most of the musical ideas on Escapade date back to 2006 - significantly, this is before my emotional state descended fully into the utter hopelessness that ended up pervading so many of its lyrics.  There was more then-recent material I could have plundered for Escapade if I'd wanted to, but I felt (I believe correctly) that most of it was some combination of hookless, overly sentimental and/or too bombastic without the substance to back it up.  Let's just say that "One of My Goof Attacks" is very atypical for me writing in 2008.

Anyway, the vocals for "Escapade" (the song) are in.  Lynsey's phrasing often reminds me of Agnetha Fältskog of ABBA fame (that's a good thing), which I feel is great for conveying a sense of tragedy without losing sight of hope.  (Think the Arrival deep cut "My Love, My Life" for example.)  At the end of the "After the Party" interpolation, I convinced her to leave in an unplanned acciaccatura.  I would never have thought of that!

This could, in theory, be the end of the project.  But for this song, there is one last thing to do.  A consequence of opening the piece with the very sparse "B" section of "March for the Age" is that it leaves the synth strings very exposed, to a far greater extent than on the original.  I think this song could stand to make a better first impression than that...

Addendum: I suspect that not many people, when recording such emotionally charged music, take the precaution of bringing a plushie to a recording session.

It is a cat.

Being specific

The take-home message of the whole Escapades saga is clearly emerging as: Don't be a control freak.  It's paradoxical, but what it fundamentally took for this material to sound in reality the way it always had in my head, was for me to relinquish absolute control.  In particular, rhythm guitar parts are extemporaneous by nature, with the result that a real guitarist will almost invariably have a much better idea than me of what will best serve the song, even though they didn't write it!  My previous unwillingness to admit this reality presumably accounts for complaints expressed by some that the arrangements on Escapade/Escapade 2 sounded unfinished, besides being overly synthesized.

At the same time, though, if one does know exactly how a part should sound, it's better to write it out as such, rather than saying vaguely "Oh, this bit can be more expressive".  The bass in "Escapade" is a case in point.  Having already familiarized myself with Bruno's style by the time I prepared the score for this song (concurrently with "Modern Art" and "Them"), I was able to notate the expressive inflections in the two passages where the bass becomes a lead instrument, rather than just writing out the "main" notes and having the bassist guess.  The result probably ranks as my favourite performance of his in this entire project, and that's saying a lot!

Incidentally, the second of these "bass solo" sections (adapted from "My Next Escape") was executed with an acoustic guitar patch on both previous versions.  It goes down to C#2, though, so to play it on a real guitar would have required either down-tuning by 3 semitones (à la Black Sabbath) or using a baritone guitar, both of which struck me as excessive for a passage lasting only 4 bars out of the song's total of 155.  So I chose to make it a bass solo instead!  In a bit of outside-the-box thinking I'm rather proud of, I transferred the actual "bass line" in this passage to the bottom line of the string arrangement.

Escapologist for a day

I still have my flute.  I can still remember the fingerings for every note from C4 (it hasn't got a B footjoint, by the way) up to B6, including the alternate fingerings required to play high trills.  I haven't actually played it in years, but I'd expect the muscle memory of the embouchure to return to me pretty quickly if past experience is anything to go by.

What I don't have is the ideal microphone for recording such an instrument, nor the knowledge of where to place said microphone.  Thus I realized it was far more efficient, in every way, to bring in an extra player for the flute part in "Escapade", rather than playing it myself.  Enter Yuri Villar (via Musiversal).  His phrasing is certainly more refined than mine would be, which helps out in both relevant passages: the nearly ambient intro now takes on a slightly exotic character (hints of Toru Takemitsu, perhaps?) while the jazzy phrases in the "After the Party"-based section are just that!

Incidentally, I originally wrote the instrumental obbligato in "After the Party" with saxophone in mind, not flute.  I have a vague recollection that "Last Day", the song created at Dartington 2006 that inspired "After the Party", featured dramatic saxophone solos.  Whether that was the case or not, the baritone sax near the end of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Pts. I-V" was certainly then among my favourite moments in all of rock.  (It still is.)  Anyway, when it came to recording "After the Party" in its excruciating entirety for Escapade 2, I drew the line at trying to synthesize a saxophone, and didn't want to outsource anything for reasons already discussed, so I ended up making the lead instrument a (real, for once!) flute instead.

I did consider transferring the line back to saxophone for Chronicles, but felt that since another part of "Escapade" (the song) features the flute anyway, the piece would gel better if I didn't.

Healing tones for a healing song

In the autumn of 2019, I had a healing experience.

I don't know why I chose Pink Floyd's The Division Bell (1994), of all albums, to listen to during a long journey to a conference.  But I did.  Meanwhile, at one point while waiting for a bus, I got what felt like my 10000th glimpse of a young couple being, well, carefree and coupley.  Unbearable pangs of envious longing caused by this sort of thing had felt like a curse on my very existence since the events described in "Look and See" - this was also my starting point for the Chronicles iteration of "Them".  In this instance, though, the usual horrible feeling of inferiority simply did not happen!  This also happened to coincide with the brilliantly executed cross-fade of "Take It Back" into "Coming Back to Life"; the sublimely beautiful guitar intro to the latter song thus became the first music I heard as a free person.

I've always seen this as one face, not two.

Thus, even if it's admittedly not to everyone's taste, the achingly pure and sweet guitar tone on "Coming Back to Life" seemed an appropriate choice for the more tender moments of "Escapade" - itself a song about leaving despair behind.  These moments would be, roughly speaking, the beginning and end of the track.  Contrasting this, we have a pair of dramatic, distorted rock solos encasing the "After the Party" interpolation.  As I write this, I'm laughing a bit at the jarring contrast between that tone and the tinny MIDI clarinet that's a placeholder for the vocals!

Program with caution

The power of technology to suck the very life out of a piece of music (at least, one that relies heavily on its emotionally charged nature) should not be underestimated.  The drums in "Escapade" illustrate this starkly.  Replacing the programmed percussion with a human player already makes me far less inclined to lose focus while listening to the track in progress - despite the fact that, on the face of it, the parts are almost identical!  I suspect that the difference is only perceptible on a subconscious level, but this only serves to illustrate the power of the subconscious.

I do find it appropriate to be thinking about this in the context of an album whose central theme (to the extent that it has one) is the layered nature of the mind...

More thoughts on MIDI

Because there's so many instrumental layers to "Escapade" (the song), I'm taking a slightly different approach to producing it compared to the previous 6 tracks.  Rather than starting with just my keyboard parts and a few placeholder "guitars" and "basses", I've opted to start by programming all the parts, drums and all, and replace them one by one.  That way, I have a basic idea, right from the start, of where every instrument should be placed in the mix (in terms of gain and pan positions).

So as it stands, it doesn't sound very good!  In fact, it currently comes together as a shrill, expressionless, synthetic cacophony.  The fact that I don't at all enjoy hearing the song in this state, though, is probably a good thing, considering that my idea of a "polished studio sound", applied to my own music, conspicuously used to be exactly that.  Moreover, this has got me thinking more deeply about why I (seemingly) had such a tin ear for production back in the Escapade and Escapade 2 eras.

Like (I'm sure) many people, I found starting out as a composer extremely frustrating.  Time and time again, I'd hear my musical efforts played by real musicians only to be disappointed that it didn't sound at all like it had in my imagination.  It often seemed like I wasn't being taken altogether seriously, although admittedly trying to glorify my student exercises the way I did can't have helped my case.  MIDI, by contrast, cannot say "I'm afraid I can't do that", nor can it question my artistic vision.  Consequently, that shrill, expressionless cacophony of MIDI instruments became, for me, the sound of me being firmly in control of my music.  And so I grew to enjoy it.

Definitely not the case now!  I actually sometimes get a bit nauseous just thinking about the extraordinarily wimpy sound of Escapade.  Sadly this colours my perception of Chronicles of a Dead End a bit, too, particularly on "Days to Midnight", no doubt because that track follows the original arrangement relatively closely.  I find it hard to keep the Escapade and Chronicles versions of the song separate in my mind.

As for Escapade 2, I had become aware by then that the PSR-5700 sounded laughably dated to 2000s-10s ears (it's a 1992 model, by the way), but was still clinging fast to the mindset that the sterile "perfection" of MIDI (filtered through, let's face it, laziness) was a desirable aesthetic for my work.  So while Escapade sounds like it came from a place of extreme confusion (accurate), Escapade 2 just comes off as a massive strop.

One note made all the difference!

Fixing the intro to "Look and See" has provided the most startling illustration I've ever encountered of how in music production, a tiny change can be extremely significant.  The rewritten synth "lead" part now goes up a 6th to a high A-flat, instead of up a whole tone to the alien-sounding Lydian intrusion in previous versions.  (The Lydian mode is my favourite mode, but I'll admit it is challenging to use well.)  Having a bigger ascending interval there makes more sense anyway for another reason: it fits the yearning character of the song.

And with that, the stage is set for the grand finale.  The "Escapade" suite itself is all that remains.  And as of this week, we more or less have confirmation that the thing that required me to keep the piece's length under 8 minutes is going ahead.  More on that later!

It's strictly rhythm

I didn't want to make the guitar cry or sing in "Look and See".  I did, initially, consider having some of the synthesizer passages played on electric guitar, but realized in time that that would have turned the song into a power ballad.  And given that one of this project's aims is to de-cheese an accidental 80s stylization, that's clearly far too risky.

So instead, the guitar's all acoustic on this one.  It starts off double-tracked for a thick texture.  Guitar 2 then drops out at the end of the first "chorus" section, officially starting the song's "decrescendo".  I introduced some further wrinkles into this by having guitar 1 switch between arpeggios and strumming quite freely.

Having said that, adding acoustic guitar to warm up the synthesizer intro ended up revealing how out-of-place some of the dissonance in said intro is.  I'm going to need to rewrite one of those synthesizer parts.  So "Look and See" isn't quite done yet, although I find it amusing that the need to tone down the "experimental" synthesizers is yet more unexpected common ground between this song and "Modern Art"!

This actually won't be the only instance in the song of a synthesizer gimmick from the Escapade version being removed or toned down: in the original there's a four-note descending "music box" bit, at the end of the first chorus, panned hard right with no reverb, thus creating the unnerving impression that the PSR-5700 is whispering in a headphone listener's ear.  In the Escapade 2 version, I transferred this to the piano.  In the Chronicles version, I'm omitting it altogether, as I feel that combined with the busier drum part, it would just create clutter.

Poetry Corner VII

For all that one of my aims, in planning Chronicles of a Dead End, was to strip Escapade of what I have come to regard as a misguided concept, I feel that it's turning out something of a concept album anyway.  It's sort of emerged organically, as while I chose the new running order mainly with a mind to what works musically, this has (broadly speaking) resulted in a most interesting arrangement where the main album's 7 tracks go from least to most personal.  So it's kind of a journey inwards through 7 concentric layers of the mind, or something like that.

In particular, even well before I'd decided on what "Escapade" (the song) should be about, it seemed to me that it and "Look and See" formed a natural pair to serve as the album's conclusion.  Therefore, it feels right to work on both side by side, even if this is actually the result of a lull in my recording schedule for "Look and See".

The difficulty in choosing a coherent lyrical topic for this one lies in the fact that its three main musical "components" each themselves have vastly different inspiration behind them.  One of them, however, is certainly best ignored: the title of "March for the Age" says it all.  If you're going to write a piece of music that bemoans the passing of some nebulously defined cultural "golden age", I think it has to be musically worthy of the best of the age in question to work.  Put another way, a piece with that title has the biggest possible shoes to fill!  In any case, I've (belatedly) learned to be leery of any narrative that asserts that there was ever a "golden age" of any kind.  And that's all I'm going to say about that.

The second(-ish) component, "My Next/Last Escape", is extremely cryptic but appears to be coming from a similar place to the "past" part of "Look and See", where I felt trapped and unable to move on from the situation described there.  I kept a surprising amount of the original first verse, but discarded the rest without a second thought, in favour of some commentary (from a hopeful perspective) on the relentless bullying that largely drove me into such a state of desperation.

The third component, "After the Party", was inspired by a song called "Last Day", one of the songs written and performed at the Rock Shop department of the 2006 Dartington International Summer School.  I don't remember much about it, other than that it was a (possibly tongue-in-cheek?) mournful commentary on the fact that adolescent relationships formed during a one-off trip away rarely, if ever, outlast said trip, much like Queen's "In Only Seven Days" (from Jazz, 1978).  I may have taken it a bit too much to heart, judging from the fact that "After the Party" blows this basic idea up into a heavy-handed universal lament.

It's undoubtedly true that romantic relationships are as ephemeral as anything else in this thing called life.  What I think "After the Party" fundamentally overlooks to catastrophic effect is that the positive memories we make during our time together never lose their value (well, unless a relationship ends in an exceptionally bad break-up).  Quite the contrary, if anything: any interaction with another person is, in the physical world, manifestly ephemeral, but in the realm of memory, the beauty of that moment is there to reflect on for a lifetime.

It logically follows that the long C-sharp major chord that ends "Escapade" represents not so much a literal interaction with anyone as it does a rush of precious memories coming back to me.  Not just a tacked-on happy ending, then, I hope.

Put it all together, and we have a song about living with the memory of things having seemed hopeless for years on end.  And why, you might ask, is the song (and the original album, for that matter) called "Escapade"?  Because a certain self-appointed expert, back then, once said to me, "You can't really meet someone until you go to university, all you can have before then is escapades".  Even if I was clearly wrong to take the whole teenage romance thing as seriously as I did, I don't think that callous dismissal was quite right either, if only because of the above-mentioned value of positive memories.

Yesterday I saw the light,
I saw so many tried to bring you down,
I wonder how I never knew
Why you're so uptight,
What the bullies shouted wasn't right,
There's someone out here looking out for you.

Stand and face the dawn within,
Don't let idiots tell you how to feel,
They don't know what you've seen.
Can you remember the death of your ordeal?
Was it really just an escapade?

Anyway the rules could bend,
And you somehow made it to the end,
The arbiters have fallen away.
Now your heart is free
To soar into your memory
Of a precious spring you'll taste again, yeah.

Just a moment in the light stretched to eternity,
The memory's still richer than the finest wine.

Stand and face the dawn within...

And with that, the writing side of this project is complete!  This has actually been quite a profound healing journey for me.  For the first time ever, I can and do talk about the Escapade disaster with people in real life.  And because, like it or not, the Escapade disaster is one of the defining events that has shaped the course of my life, that's an enormous burden off my shoulders.

Restraint with the bass

After two consecutive fast songs with very active, involved bass guitar parts, it feels a bit strange to have the instrument back in a supporting role for "Look and See".  This mostly meant having it much less prominent in the mix than it's been in a while - when I first imported the stems, I found they completely swamped the drums!  As with (yet again) "Modern Art", I opted to use the amplifier rather than the DI.

I ended up combining elements of two very different takes here.  The first is a straightforward reading of the part, and the second is, as Bruno put it, "less surgical".  I found that there were points where the expressiveness of the latter take adds welcome warmth to the sound, but others where it just sounds intrusive.

In theory, the song could be considered complete now, as there is no guitar at all in the Escapade or Escapade 2 version of this one.  However, the "decrescendo" I envisioned, as anticipated, doesn't quite come off yet.  With some acoustic guitar to thicken the texture early on, I think it will.

Time gets somewhat muddled here

Besides Escapade, I can't think of many albums where one track has made the complete journey from my least favourite to one I have a particular fondness for.  One that does spring to mind is The Good Son (1990) by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, on which I used to think "The Witness Song" was a low point, just hearing it as long-winded and pointlessly noisy.  That changed when I re-listened to this CD for the first time in years, as it happened, shortly after seeing the 2022 film Elvis.  With that context, the vibe of "The Witness Song" struck me as, basically, the sound of Elvis Presley turning to the dark side.  And I can't not love a song that pulls that off.

"As you can see, young Elvis, your Colonel has failed.  Now you will be the witness when the fog's too thick to see!"

"Look and See" could actually be said to be a song where time gets somewhat muddled, due to the interaction between the past and the present in the lyrics, as well as its reversal of the usual dynamics in this genre.  In order to create enough space in the song for the diminuendo to work, I had to have the drums enter earlier than in the Escapade or Escapade 2 version.  I took the opportunity, however, to adapt both previous drum parts: the rather busy Escapade part for the first "chorus" and an elaboration of the sparser Escapade 2 part for the second verse/"chorus" section.  And as a little something extra, I applied a fade-out to the entire audio of the overhead stems, making the overall drum sound very slowly become less resonant during the song.

A different sort of hybrid

As with "Modern Art", I've opted to hybridize the starkly contrasting Escapade and Escapade 2 versions of "Look and See" for the Chronicles of a Dead End version.  Unlike that one, though, this is more of a case of maximizing the strengths of both previous versions, rather than minimizing weaknesses, even if there are also plenty of those!  After all, it brings me quite a bit of relief to note that, having now prepared the arrangements for all 7 songs, I'll probably never have to listen to anything from Escapade or Escapade 2 ever again in my life.

The hybrid approach is crystallized in the intro.  Here, I've opted for the Escapade approach of 10 bars of lush, symphonic layered synthesizers before the piano enters, rather than having the piano there from the start as in the Escapade 2 version.  However, the melody is played using the exact same Jupiter-santur tone as in the latter, the difference being that I'm actually playing it this time, instead of feeding this not-particularly-difficult line into the Jupiter-80's "MIDI IN" port.

Beyond that, the basic idea behind the arrangement is a kind of progressive scaling down, starting out with almost operatic fervour and gradually diminishing, with the final verse (the "present" part, if you like) being just a very hushed vocal and a sparse piano part.  I can't, off the top of my head, actually think of any other rock or pop song that reverses the usual dynamics in this way!  The parallel that most readily springs to my mind is a classical one: the heartbreakingly beautiful chorus "The Shepherds' Farewell to the Holy Family" from Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ.

The final verse is marked pppp.

In the vocals department, I went for all the theatrical intensity I could muster for the "main" (i.e. "past") part of the song, and also used heavier reverb than usual to emphasize that this is essentially a flashback.  Ultimately how I'll mix this is far from certain, though, as not only are there bass and drums to come, but I've opted for some acoustic guitar to fill out the texture as well.  This seemed to me to match the singer-songwriter elements of this track, which is ironic in view of the fact that (again, like "Modern Art") there's no guitar at all in either previous version.

Poetry Corner VI

At a glance, Escapade is a predominantly downtempo album, with 5 of its 7 tracks executed at 100 BPM or less.  Chronicles of a Dead End redresses the balance in several ways: primarily, the addition of "One of My Goof Attacks" as a third fast number, the condensation of the "Escapes" into one piece, and the fact that this kind of music tends to feel faster when played on traditional instruments instead of MIDI.

Nonetheless, it's surprising to realize that "Look and See" is the only real ballad in the set.  Near misses include "Modern Art" (deliberately unsentimental), "Faraway Island" (as Lynsey astutely put it, "upbeat but not forceful") and the Escapade 2-exclusive "After the Party" (just plain doesn't work as a full song).

Up to this point, I have largely kept the emotional pain behind so much of this album's material at arm's length in the lyrics.  "Look and See" is the one song where I don't think that would work.  Despite the theatrical character of the melody (a consequence, I think, of me not infrequently accompanying my music teacher's other students on piano in my early- to mid-teens), the Escapade 2 version demonstrates (in embryo, at least) that the best approach to this song is one of intense vulnerability.

Ironically, the song's extremely sparse presentation on Escapade 2 is a consequence of me, at the time, disliking the Escapade version and wanting as little to do with it as possible.  This also resulted in by far the most extensive lyrical rewrite on 2.  Now, matters are complicated by the fact that the Escapade version has grown greatly in my estimation in the years since those sessions, so we now have two very different versions of this song to draw on.

The key to the song, I think, lies in my favourite line on all of Escapade:

"Even if you say I'll lose my mind"

Who is this line addressed to?  Everyone.  In the situation I'm pretty sure this is about, basically everyone was telling me (with varying degrees of subtlety) that I was well down the rabbit hole.  And startlingly, I realize all these years later that the naysayers included me all along!  I really wanted to not be single, but 90% of my effort to remedy that consisted of racking my brains trying to figure out a way to ask out one of my friends that wouldn't just come off as weird... and failing to think of anything.

Clearly, I knew deep down that what I really needed to do was to go out and meet new people, but I literally did not feel safe doing so.  I had been deeply shaken by the experience of (twice in just a few months) having a (debatably) hopeless crush rumbled by bullies to devastating effect, and concluded (I believe correctly) that nervousness was the reason why things weren't going too well for me.  My crucial mistake was to conclude that the way out of this had to be by way of someone who wouldn't make me nervous.  Oops.

The final verse, which is basically the first verse of the Escapade 2 version, switches the timeframe from the past to the present.  This is potentially the turning point, not only of this song, but of the whole album.  Interestingly, this juxtaposition of timeframes is very similar to an old friend: none other than Meat Loaf's "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" - also track 6 on a 7-track album!

Every day I'm waiting in line
For a friend to signal to go.
Even if you say I'll lose my mind,
How else could I know,

What is real?  Look and see,
These feelings don't make sense to me,
But my mind is made.

Why do I have to go somewhere new?
It's happened twice before,
Someone sees and calls me such a fool.
So much for an open door.

I believe, look and see,
I only need one miracle,
And it will be good.

And then, look and see,
I won't go through that pain again,
But I'll make it out of here.

I knew that I was wasting my voice,
It seemed my only choice.
I had hoped it wouldn't come to this,
How could I get all the way home?

On a lighter note, a good thing to come out of this is that "One of My Goof Attacks" inspired me to finally listen to some posthumously released Hendrix!  I went for South Saturn Delta, which seems to be quite highly regarded.  There's not much I can say beyond "it's Jimi, and Jimi is cool"... except that the Bo Hansson cover "Tax Free" made me want to sing Van Halen's "Runnin' with the Devil" over it, and that "Midnight" sounds at times eerily similar to U2's later "Bullet the Blue Sky", of all things.

The letters are shiny.  So much for CD packaging being boring.

This goof attack isn't!

As a final touch on the mix of "One of My Goof Attacks", I used the amplifier bass stem in the passages near the beginning and end where it's dueling with my (Jupiter-)organ work, and switched to the DI for when the full band is playing.  I felt that the organ needed the retro warmth of the former to offset it, but that to anchor the driving rock sound of the rest of the track, the DI was called for.

That brings us, at last, to the album's home stretch, in which things are about to get a lot more serious.  And while "One of My Goof Attacks" is, in isolation, the least earnest song in the set, I also feel that this is the right place for it in a way I didn't intend.  Yes, the point of the song is to make light of my tendency (as a child and teenager, that is) to appear momentarily scatterbrained under pressure, but I'm sure the reason that happened so much was because I was paying too much attention to my own daydreams instead of to what was actually happening around me.  Such daydreams are, essentially, the topic of the next song.

"Move over, Rover..."

I feel that "One of My Goof Attacks" is evolving into a bridge of sorts between the more light-hearted proto-hard rock of Cream and the rawer, darker tones of the Jimi Hendrix Experience.  The influence of the former is of course felt in the vocal harmonies, but the guitar work, in which the riffage and solo alike are treated with a special gritty flair, is pure Hendrix.  In the case of the solo, I transcribed the one in the Escapade 2 version right up to the point where I remember running out of ideas, and indicated that the rest should be improvised.  The result ends with a noise that, if I were to hear it out of context, I'd probably think was from one of those posthumous Hendrix albums I still have yet to hear.

The drums turned out a lot of fun.  I mixed them with a longer reverb time than I might otherwise have done, the better for them to offset the organ in the coda.  This in turn guided my decision to offset that by having only light reverb on the guitar.

Poetry Corner V

Of the four tracks on Escapade 2 that are either drastically different from their Escapade counterparts or completely new, "One of My Goof Attacks" is easily my favourite.  As with "Them", I think this is partly because by its own nature it withstands its parent album's systemic faults better than its surroundings.  In this case, the song doesn't have the inherent earnestness of (say) "Days to Midnight" or "After the Party" so my lack of emotional commitment to the project doesn't hurt the track as much.

There's not that much to talk about with this song.  It has the distinction of being the one that needs the least amount of reworking, to the point that I'm even leaving the original lyrics intact.  I include them here solely for the sake of completeness.

Just another time today,
Just another thing gets said,
And I don't realize,
I've had a goof attack.

Suddenly the air is funny,
Suddenly I'm feeling red,
Only then you'll say to me,
I've had a goof attack.

I never see it coming,
I never stop myself,
It happens just like that,
I have a goof attack.

In starting to record this, though, a surprising challenge manifested itself: it turned out that a little of the "organ" (which is actually Jupiter-80) tone I chose goes a long way.  That wouldn't be a problem, except that in the Escapade 2 arrangement, the organ goes completely solo for 4 whole bars near the end, resulting in a similar problem to the one I previously encountered in "Faraway Island".  I decided to write a new drum part to go underneath this passage.

In the incremental layering of vocal harmonies from one verse to the next (inspired, I'm pretty sure, by Elton John's "Grey Seal") I chose to sing all the parts myself, despite that in verse 3 this necessitated quite a lot of falsetto.  I considered having Lynsey on the top part, but previous experience has taught me that while layering one's voice onto itself is a difficult challenge, layering it onto another's is even harder.  The whole experience of recreating this arrangement ended up demonstrating what difference a proper vocal microphone makes.  In particular, I vividly remember, when recording the climactic "WHOA!!!!" in the Escapade 2 version, having to dangle my stereo microphone off the edge of my desk and use only the signal from the side pointing away from me, lest the volume clip.  This time, I only had to turn down the input level on my recording device!

In a weird way, I find it encouraging that the placeholder synthesized "rhythm guitar" currently in the mix sounds really quite bad to me: this implies that I'm hearing such things more objectively than I did in the Escapade or Escapade 2 era.  The tone, probably created with power-chord-laden metal stylistics in mind, is actually too distorted for this old-fashioned, crunchy blues-rock song, as what are supposed to be "chords" end up as rather inharmonious scrunching noises.  It's very telling that, in the bluesy proto-hard rock of the likes of Jimi Hendrix or Cream, guitar tones are very often lighter on the distortion than you might think.

The final comparison

What I've consistently found, while working on this, is that as I approach the end point of working on a track, I suddenly start to dread hearing it.  I hope that's just a case of me getting overexposed to my own work!  I guess it's encouraging that, when I go back to listen to a track that's not the one I'm sick of (there are now 3 of those) I often find it to sound much better than I remember.

I'll be honest, though: the vocals on "Them" didn't turn out quite the way I imagined.  Still, enough of this track is instrumental that the vocals, and indeed the lyrics, can be treated as almost an afterthought, rather like on some King Crimson albums - think Starless and Bible Black (1974) or The Power to Believe (2003).

This is the final time I'll be including clips of the Escapade and Escapade 2 versions of the song at the end of the video.  The reason for this is that the next song, "One of My Goof Attacks", appeared for the first time on Escapade 2 so there is no Escapade version.  And after that, we come to the final two songs, "Look and See" and "Escapade", where such clips would be rather mood-inappropriate.

"...the Destroyer of Worlds."

For all that Chronicles of a Dead End is indeed a prog album in form, I've now felt, while mixing both fast numbers, that there's a punkish energy to the music at the same time.  In this case, it's the sepulchral 5-string bass work on "Them" that's giving me that impression.  Combine this with some beautifully raw rhythm guitar work and the multi-tracked, heavily reverbed drums in the two taiko-like passages, and the effect is like thunder.  There's a strong possibility that "Them" might remain my favourite song in the set - but for completely different reasons than before.  Keep in mind that, for the time being, the Ellen Foley vocal impression still only exists in my head.

I did use a bit of volume-envelope trickery here.  I've found throughout this project that bass DI, while it has an imposing presence (necessary for this track in particular), doesn't capture dynamic subtleties as well as the mic'd amplifier would.  So in the bass part underneath the first guitar solo, I had to carefully engineer the crescendi on my end.  While I was at it, I used a similar trick in the final phase of the "development", building up to the climactic re-statement of the intro.

Spot the MIDI!

In my younger days, I spent so much time experimenting with the PSR-5700 (which I would ultimately give away during the 2012 Escapade 2 sessions) that after all these years, I can still clearly remember exactly which MIDI instrument is which.  Therefore, I thought it might be fun (and maybe instructive?) to listen to Escapade straight through, making a complete list of the General MIDI sounds used in every song.

Technical note: I count my MIDI instruments from 1-128, not from 0-127 as some do.  This was the numbering system used in both the interface of the PSR-5700 and in the software I grew up with.

I don't currently own any General MIDI-compatible devices so this demonstration was entirely silent.

The instruments on each track are listed below in order of appearance.

1a. March for the Age

• 39 Synth Bass 1
• 95 Pad 7 (halo)
• 89 Pad 1 (new age)
• 48 Timpani
• 52 Synth Strings 2
• - Standard Drums

1b. My Next Escape

• 29 Electric Guitar (muted)
• - Standard Drums
  
• 33 Acoustic Bass
• 1 Acoustic Grand Piano
• 52 Synth Strings 2
• 25 Acoustic Guitar (nylon)
• 81 Lead 1 (square)

2. Days to Midnight

• 15 Tubular Bells
• 13 Marimba
• 51 Synth Strings 1
• - Standard Drums
• 33 Acoustic Bass
• 1 Acoustic Grand Piano
• 30 Overdriven Guitar

3. Modern Art

• 76 Pan Flute
• 36 Fretless Bass
• - Standard Drums
• 81 Lead 1 (square)
• 1 Acoustic Grand Piano
• 52 Synth Strings 2
• 98 FX 2 (soundtrack)
• 89 Pad 1 (new age)
• 104 FX 8 (sci-fi)
• 127 Applause
• 82 Lead 2 (sawtooth)
• 119 Synth Drum
• 93 Pad 5 (bowed)
• 15 Tubular Bells

4. What Is Mine

• 33 Acoustic Bass
• 89 Pad 1 (new age)
• 101 FX 5 (brightness)
• 104 FX 8 (sci-fi)
• 1 Acoustic Grand Piano
• 86 Lead 6 (voice)
• 11 Music Box
• - Standard Drums

5. Them

• - Standard Drums
• 31 Distortion Guitar
• 89 Pad 1 (new age)
• 33 Acoustic Bass
• 98 FX 2 (soundtrack)
• 17 Drawbar Organ
• 29 Electric Guitar (muted)
• 30 Overdriven Guitar

6. Faraway Island

• 123 Seashore (sort of - used as impulse to filter white noise)
  
• 1 Acoustic Grand Piano
• 51 Synth Strings 1
• 30 Overdriven Guitar
• 33 Acoustic Bass
• 26 Acoustic Guitar (steel)
• - Standard Drums
• 18 Percussive Organ
• 82 Lead 2 (sawtooth)
  

7. My Last Escape

• 1 Acoustic Grand Piano
• - Standard Drums
• 33 Acoustic Bass
• 29 Electric Guitar (muted)
• 89 Pad 1 (new age)
• 52 Synth Strings 2
• 25 Acoustic Guitar (nylon)
• 48 Timpani

I'm particularly struck by how many entries in this list have a program number between 81 and 104 inclusive, or feature the word "Synth".  I think this reflects something I've believed, to a greater or lesser degree, all along: that synthesizers are best used in ways that don't even try to pretend to not be synthesizers.  It's just unfortunate that, combined with what resources I perceived to be available to me back in 2009, this resulted in a completely inappropriate production style for the music I was writing.

Making a similar list for Escapade 2 would be an exponentially more difficult endeavour.  The Jupiter-80 is not General MIDI-compatible, so I had literally thousands of different tones to choose from for every part - particularly the "obviously a synthesizer" parts, and there's rather a lot of those!  In some cases, I can remember the name of what I chose, usually in a "what was I thinking?" context, but there'd also be a lot of trawling through hundreds of lead or pad sounds in search of something I recognize.  I don't think it's worth the effort.

Transforming despair into hope

While I think "Faraway Island" will go down as this project's biggest technical hurdle for various reasons, the honour of being the biggest emotional hurdle goes to the other extended piece: a suite combining elements of "March for the Age", the "Escapes" and "After the Party", closing the album, which I have decided to title simply "Escapade".  (I can already imagine feeling the need to reassure the other musicians that this is not a Janet Jackson cover.)  Given the emotionally charged nature of this track, as well as it being the most drastic musical re-working by far, I have decided to prepare the score in advance alongside working on the other stuff, so that when we "officially" get to this one I can concentrate solely on lyrics.

All three of its component parts are, in isolation, among the musically darkest material in the set.  Moreover, as things stand the long C-sharp major chord (with instrumental noodling on top) that ends "My Last Escape", and consequently both Escapade and Escapade 2, feels to me like a tacked-on happy ending, even though I'm also convinced it is the right ending for the album.  Therefore, the task at hand is to contextualize this ending by fusing three songs of despair into one song of hope.

This is where it's going.

On top of this, for reasons that will hopefully become clear in due course, I really wanted to keep the piece's length under 8 minutes.  (That would be 160 4/4 bars at this song's tempo.)  Amazingly, this seemed to happen organically, without me having to cut or rush anything - the total length of the score is 155 bars.  This literally felt like a miracle.

The piece basically falls into 4 main sections:

1. "March for the Age" - bars 1-27
2. "My Next Escape" - bars 28-75
3. "After the Party" - bars 76-102
4. "My Last Escape" - bars 103-155

I've included the original titles in this breakdown solely for reference.  What strikes me immediately here is that the "Escapes" ultimately provide basically two-thirds of the music!  Well, I did say I was going to work in "salvageable elements" of the other two songs, after all.

The "March for the Age" section consists largely of the strings/flute "B" section of the original.  This is not so much a new idea as a return to form: in the sketch this is ultimately based on, this served as intro and verses, paired with what would become the "Escapes" chorus.  As a transition to the "My Next Escape" section we have the only contribution from the harmonically static "A" sections of the march.  I felt this to be necessary because it does have a melodic connection to that ending.

It's been Yamaha-strings.  It's been Jupiter-theremin.  This time it's going to be clean electric guitar, an octave lower of course.

I decided to make it more interesting by adding a bass guitar countermelody based on the longer variant of the "Escapes" post-chorus.

The "My Next Escape" section is largely unaltered from the original, up to and including the guitar solo verse.  It's worth mentioning that in the second verse of the Escapade 2 version, I remember absent-mindedly pushing the button to record some harmony vocals despite not having a plan, and surprising myself by improvising a really inspired part!  I like the result so much that I've transcribed it for the new version, even with no lyrics as yet.

I didn't want to overexpose the "Escapes" chorus before the piece is coming in to land.  Therefore, rather than leading into the second chorus, the guitar solo instead leads directly into the "After the Party" section.  This is not a full statement of what is, after all, my least favourite song on either Escapade.  Instead it's basically just enough of a nod to "After the Party" to open up new possibilities for the next and final section of the piece.  I have of course completely re-written the piano part to (hopefully) not be such a flagrant "The Great Gig in the Sky" wannabe this time!

It's a harmonic what-if scenario inspired by "The Great Gig in the Sky".  That does not mean it should actually sound like that Pink Floyd classic!

A quiet string arrangement based on the "After the Party" coda serves as the calm before the storm of the "My Last Escape" section.  As on both Escapades, this will be heralded by a theatrical piano/drums re-statement of the "Escapes" riff.  However, I feel that both extant versions of "My Last Escape" fail to realize the dramatic promise here.  So this time, I've combined it with the tritone progression of the "After the Party" introduction, and added what I hope will be the most intense distorted guitar moment on the whole of Chronicles.  It leads naturally into a guitar transcription of one of the "After the Party" flute solos, but with "Escapes" arrangement - it's wholly fortuitous that the chord changes of these songs overlap so much, but it's most welcome.

Only then do we get a second "Escapes" chorus.  But it's not quite the same!  The detail of one chord being changed in this restatement, doesn't seem so random in this version: the altered chord happens to be a tritone away from the key chord, so the interpolation of "After the Party" material contextualizes it.  This is followed not by just a cursory nod to "March for the Age", but instead a whole "verse" using a written solo adapted from the original pre-divergence sketch.  That sketch is probably from February 2006, by the way, making it the oldest material on the whole album.

And then, at last, we have the final chorus (only the 3rd statement, compared to effectively 4 in previous versions) and the blissful C-sharp major finish.

To me, this feels like a new composition that happens to consist entirely of old material.  I already cannot imagine a more fitting conclusion to Chronicles of a Dead End.

A song of ice and fire

When George R. R. Martin chose that as the name of his famous series of fantasy novels (which I've never read), I don't think he meant it literally.  But with some fiery electric guitar work in place alongside the various machine-like elements, that's exactly what "Them" is well on the way to becoming.

It proved to be a difficult part.  That couldn't be helped, as the song's heavy classical influence means that in the various written lead parts, every note is important.  I did, however, opt to have an improvised solo near the end, instead of yet another restatement of the basic melody.  The song's climax, meanwhile, proved so explosive that I think it will be worth the awkwardness of having Lynsey do the wild "Wooooooo!" from the corresponding moment in the Escapade version to crown it.

It's honestly a little freaky how similar my guide sounds to the original.

In the Escapade 2 version, this moment is far more restrained and has me mimicking (surprisingly decently) the gentler falsetto "ooooo" near the end of the Beatles' "Get Back".  I guess that could be a "plan B" of sorts if I ultimately decide this is just too ridiculous.

Poetry Corner IV

No, there's no III.  After some deliberation, I decided to have the Roman numerals in these post titles always correspond to the track numbers.

Once it became clear to me that "Them" was going to need Lynsey on vocals, it soon followed that I needed, at the very least, to change the perspective.  At first, I envisioned this as someone in a relationship not wanting to make single people feel inferior - perhaps inspired by the idea of an imploring "Paradise by the Dashboard Light"-like vocal treatment.  This, however, struck me as a risky approach because unless it was done just right, I'd come off as clueless at best.  So instead, I chose to broaden the song's perspective yet further, turning it into a more general protest against status symbols of all kinds.

Interestingly, this still allowed me to re-use most of the original second verse, and some of the third verse I added for the Escapade 2 version (in the Escapade version the third verse is, yet again, the same as the first).  Only the first verse was completely re-written, drastically re-contextualizing the rest.

Look around, up and down,
You'll see people so sad beyond measure,
Those who never had your little treasure.
Don't you want to throw away your crown?

Don't just say you understand,
When I can see you've never known their pain.
They'll be lying out in the pouring rain,
Doesn't matter where you stand.

Are they there just for your style?
They are on this ride, just like you and me.
Do you want to show what they might never be,
Or do you want to see them smile?

One thing I'm still undecided on is whether I should leave the song title as simply "Them", or add a subtitle in brackets before or after it.  And if the latter, what should it be?

Undeleted talkback

As things stand, the in-progress mix of "Them" ends with a barely-audible me saying the word "excellent".  This was, of course, me reacting to the drum take I'm using.  Normally, I would have already cut that off, but because the song will ultimately end in a fade-out, such editing is fairly pointless until all the instruments in that passage are mixed in.  That won't be the case until the 5-string bass guitar is recorded.

Mixing this drum performance wasn't so easy.  I didn't want the drums too prominent for most of the song, largely because of its length and bass-heavy nature, but the two taiko-style passages are another matter entirely, especially since the first of these opens the song with drums literally on their own.  I used a combination of two strategies to make this work.  Firstly, for those passages I faded up two extra ambient microphones that I normally don't use, giving a bit of extra resonance to the "main" drum track there.  Second, and more importantly, I superimposed two alternate takes of the passages, placing one at each end of the stereo picture, and added a large amount of reverb to these "extra" drums.  The effect is as thunderous as the intro to a song with 5-string bass needs to be!

"I have a bad feeling about this"

Even though "Them" is hands-down my favourite track on Escapade, I approach it this time with some trepidation.  Its original lyrical subject matter (jealousy and paranoia in the face of perceived romantic competition) is, to put it lightly, a touchy subject nowadays.  Thankfully, at least, the original lyrics are (as usual) extremely cryptic so they don't bother me as much as they potentially could.

Keeping them intact is, however, out of the question for a somewhat esoteric musical reason.  The Escapade and Escapade 2 versions of this song both take advantage of a synthesized bass's ability to go much lower than an actual bass guitar can.

Carole King said it best: "I feel the earth move".

Obviously, this calls for a 5-string bass guitar, but even those only go down as far as B0 in standard tuning.  Transposing the song up 1 semitone would theoretically work, but would also put the song into the fiendishly difficult-to-read key of G-sharp minor (that's 5 sharps).  So I've opted to transpose it up 2 semitones, into A minor... which puts the vocal part a bit beyond my comfortable range.

Lynsey to the rescue!

Which, in turn, means that a radically different lyrical approach is called for.  Truth told, I'm still undecided between several different angles I could take.  However, while I don't know what the vocalist should be singing, I do know how I want the vocals to sound.  I arrived at this by a circuitous route.  Some time before planning Chronicles of a Dead End, I cooked meatloaf (the food, that is) for the first time in my life.

Not my most hated of all loaves, it turns out.

As you might expect, the conversation at the family dinner table soon turned to Meat Loaf (the musician), who had then recently passed away.  And that conversation, of all things, got me interested in listening to his work for the first time, ever.  Ironically, what jumped out at me the most had nothing to do with Meat Loaf at all: namely, Ellen Foley's gloriously heated co-lead vocal in "Paradise by the Dashboard Light".

Anyway, I soon realized that Foley's part was exactly how "Them" should have sounded all along.  As an aside, I find it amusing that Foley's singing technique runs circles around Meat Loaf's notorious lack thereof, while at the same time being at least his equal (if not his superior) in sheer dramatic force.

Not that I'm suggesting that "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" would be a good lyrical model for this.  It wouldn't.  It's just a point of departure, really.

That aside, a big part of why I like "Them" so much is because it's the one time that the goofy, and at the same time somewhat eerie, video-game-music-like quality imparted by Escapade's production is not completely out of place.  In the interest of preserving something of that, I've opted to program more of the keyboards than usual on the Chronicles version; exceptions are the organ throughout and one quiet synthesizer solo in the middle.

As a composition, I actually think it's pretty far from Escapade's strongest offering.  In particular, I was never quite satisfied with the way the song started with a "Won't Get Fooled Again"-like long power chord amid noisy drums, but (back then) wasn't really sure how the song should begin.  This time, though, I had to think of something different, because "Days to Midnight" (which is the album opener this time) already starts with a similar gesture, and I don't want to repeat myself too much.

What I ultimately decided on was to cannibalize the drum intro of another song I'd written around the same time, but never released.  The passage has a flavour of the primal power of Japanese taiko drumming, I think.  I considered bringing in an actual taiko artist, but without knowing what kind of notation (if any) they'd be familiar with, that would be difficult.

While I was at it, I abridged the "development" section quite a bit.  It's an interesting idea, but I'll freely admit that the extent to which I stretched it out for the Escapade version was filler.  As a result, the Chronicles of a Dead End version of "Them" is going to be about a minute shorter than previous versions, even with (like "Days to Midnight") the tempo slowed down a notch.

End of side A already!

It's hard to believe we're here already, but "Modern Art" is done!  Completing the track's subtly retro aesthetic, I used the mic'd amplifier for the bass in the mix, and panned it 50% right, exactly opposite the kick drum.  This is in contrast with my usual practice of using just the DI signal.

And that's "side A" of Chronicles of a Dead End!  My thoughts on this project, so far, are very positive.  I love how "Days to Midnight", now an apocalyptic wall-of-sound rock number, gets this off to a very atypical start for a prog album.  With "Faraway Island" I feel vindicated, as the weakest track on Escapade has, with a little re-arranging, become a song that works both as a regular track 2 and as side A's big epic.  This actually came about by accident: I found while mixing the keyboards that the organ solo between sections "A" and "B" of "Faraway Island" sounded annoying without having something else to ground it.  That something else ended up being a choir pad, played on the Jupiter-80, which serves the additional purpose of throwing the whole track into a different dimension at, essentially, the moment where the structure makes its first big departure from the simple folk ballad it initially is.

Moving over to side B now, we come to my long-time favourite song in the set.

Different drums (and a different bass)

As I hoped, the drum take I ended up with for "Modern Art" has a nice, retro relaxed feel to it.  (In the sheet music I'd prepared, I marked it "Think Beatles".)  I decided to lean into this by mixing the drums slightly differently from normal, at least for the non-Goof Attack mix!  Rather than have every stem at a different pan position, I divided them strictly into three groups, panning one 50% left, one centre and one 50% right - the effect does indeed hearken back to the late 1960s when producers were just starting to fully explore the possibilities of stereo.

The interlude between verses 3 and 4 has undergone another significant revision, as if it wasn't already different enough from the five-sawtooth-synthesizer freak-out in the Escapade version.  I'd long felt that the sequence of piano chords that replaces it in the Escapade 2 version (as well as the informal solo-piano version before it) also needed a bass part underneath it that isn't just one repeated note.  But I wasn't sure how it might play out, other than vaguely wanting something funky.

So I had the drummer improvise something funky there.  I then transcribed what he came up with back into the score, and with that, the right bass line came to me, clear as day.  So although the track in progress sounds a little strange, I think it'll ultimately come together quite nicely.

I almost had another goof attack

Naturally, after mentioning it in my last post, I ended up putting on Asia's Phoenix that evening.  I found it strangely instructive to revisit, largely by way of an accident.

They fly now?!

In track 6 of 12, "I Will Remember You" (which is probably the album's weakest track anyway), I couldn't help noticing that John Wetton's vocal part comes within a stone's throw of quoting ABBA's "I Wonder (Departure)" at one point.  I was so startled by this, I couldn't resist pausing the Asia album and pulling out the liner notes to my copy of ABBA: The Album, to see if the lyric was actually the same.  For the record, one word of the lyrics is different but the melodies are identical for 2 whole bars!

I then took a bathroom break before resuming the Asia album.  And I was surprised, after having taken a break, at how enjoyable I found the second half.  I'd always thought of Phoenix as one of those "front-loaded" albums where the most gripping material is crammed into the first 40% or so of the track listing, but it turns out that impression was largely due to the album's exhausting, relentlessly dense production.  Simply approaching the second half refreshed allowed me to appreciate its highlights a whole lot more.

If it'd been up to me, the cover of "Orchard of Mines" would be track 6 or 7 instead of track 10, as it's the closest any track on Phoenix gets to being sparse enough to function as a mid-album breather.  As it is, the album basically doesn't have one.

(Don't worry.  I do not plan on seeking out a hard copy of any other Asia album.)

Anyway, when I first began pondering the possibility of a third Escapade last year, I initially planned on leaving out "Modern Art" altogether, due to the piece's particularly embarrassing history.  I now realize that would have been a mistake.  The presence of a relaxing, refreshing, but not too jarring, interlude is a good thing in this kind of music.

The other option, of course, is to have "breather" passages within long pieces.  "I Get Up, I Get Down" from Yes' Close to the Edge is one of the most masterful examples, and interestingly I'm reminded of it every time I reach the slow section of the first movement in Mahler's Symphony No. 6.  That was completed in 1906, by the way: I'm sure that retaining audiences' attention has always been a subtle art.

I'd say the "dedicated breather track" option is the safer option to take.  And, well, the Chronicles of a Dead End version of "Modern Art" just happens to have been conceived as such from the start!

The only slightly difficult thing about turning "Modern Art" into an instrumental is that it has 5 verses, a consequence of the original poem's length, and thus could get boring if done too slavishly.  The solution I hit upon was for verses 1, 3 and 5 to mimic the original Escapade vocal as closely as possible, but for verses 2 and 4 to be improvised variations on it.  What I ended up with does not disappoint.  And no, I did not subject a professional guitarist to my misguided attempt at a falsetto vocal.  I transcribed it myself.

Drums are coming next.

Modern Art and more

Chronicles of a Dead End is a prog album.  I wasn't 100% sure of that going in, but the fact that the bassist and the guitarist both commented (approvingly) on the prog feel detectable in "Days to Midnight" left me in no doubt.

It would be an exaggeration to say that you can't have a prog album without an acoustic guitar instrumental serving as a relaxed intermezzo of sorts.  Nonetheless, there's a reason why it's a common choice, either as a pure acoustic guitar track or a band instrumental with acoustic guitar as the lead instrument.  Furthermore, "Modern Art" seems almost tailored to be adapted into the latter, as there's no guitar at all in the backing instruments - just piano, bass, drums and (in the Escapade version) various goofy synthesizer effects.

Needless to say, the version on the main album will not feature those!  It turned out to be surprisingly straightforward to transcribe the basic accompaniment of the Escapade version and adapt it to the calmer structure of the Escapade 2 version.  Accordingly, the Chronicles version will restore the piece to its original key of E minor.  This also opens the intriguing possibility of making two separate mixes of this track: the "normal" version on the main album, and a special "Goof Attack Remix" restoring the weird synthesizer passages as a bonus track.

Another possibility for a bonus track is a new version of "March for the Age".  I know I said before that it's not a very substantial composition, and it certainly made for a poor opener on both Escapades.  But during some "Faraway Island"-related downtime, I experimented a bit, and I ended up feeling that taken on its own terms it works quite well as a synthesizer showcase.  (I recreated the rumbling fade-in by slowing down the roar of an industrial-grade dehumidifier, and was amused to notice that you can't spell "dehumidifier" without "MIDI".)  No, I wouldn't say that "March for the Age" or the original "Modern Art" is conventionally good music, but they're essentially harmless, and I'd say they're both part of the Escapade mythos.

I also considered a version of "After the Party", but decided against it.  There is salvageable material in the song (its chord changes are conveniently similar to the "Escapes"), but as an entity in itself, it's too deeply rooted in crushing futility for comfort.  Moreover, I knew for sure I'd goofed up with that song when I ended up making another Asia-related comparison in my head: "Nothing's Forever" is a track on their (shockingly good) 2008 reunion album Phoenix, and makes my basic point (which is exactly what the Asia song title suggests) in a way that is neither depressing nor dull.  So, um, I'm going to stick with my first idea of cannibalizing elements of "After the Party" to flesh out the "Escapes".

So take the train

The beast that is "Faraway Island" has officially been tamed!  With that, I feel we may already have overcome Chronicles of a Dead End's biggest technical hurdle.  Again I've included, in this video, brief snippets of the previous versions; the Escapade version in particular shows most clearly just how badly I was overreaching, attempting to make this kind of music on my own.

Besides the line-up already introduced, we have Lynsey Tibbs (via Musiversal) on vocals.  She has a 3-octave range, but isn't one to rub it in the listener's face, instead simply using it to make heady heights seem completely effortless.  I'm also impressed by her stylish vibrato, which she doesn't overuse but treats as just another vocal effect.

The landscape on the planned album cover, by the way, is based on a photo I took during a 2018 visit to the actual place that inspired this particular song.  The colour filter I put it through is a sly cross-reference to the (ridiculous) original Escapade artwork, in which I was attempting to apply some sort of trippy psychedelic effect to my 18-year-old face.

Who needs Roger Dean?

Next up is... the piece of music that started the whole Escapade saga: "Modern Art".

Welcome to prog...

"It's a bit of a long song," commented the vocalist during the recording session for "Faraway Island".  In fact the sections with vocals only account for 79 of the song's 211 bars (that comes to 3 minutes out of nearly 9) but it's true that the part somehow feels longer than that.  Its classical-like complexity also makes it challenging to sing, which is why I struggled so much with it in previous iterations, and also why I chose to bring in another vocalist this time.

Nonetheless, there are some beautiful moments in the end result.  Section "B" in particular soars to exactly the kind of heights that I might have ill-advisedly attempted to pull off myself on the original.  There's a very brief bit of harmony in a certain spot corresponding to where I added harmony in the (omitted this time) "B" reprise section in the Escapade version.

Before the vocals were recorded but after I sent the work in progress to our vocalist, though, I got the bass recorded and mixed in.  It turned out that a real electric bass guitar has a less penetrating timbre than the MIDI bass that I used as a placeholder, so I had to have the synthesizers a fraction quieter than before, allowing the bass to cut through the mix as more than just a background presence.  It's a very active bass part that needs to be heard and not merely felt, particularly in the "B" and "C" sections.

I did in fact end up having to use volume-envelope trickery on the acoustic guitar part.  It turned out that in the later "A" sections, having the guitar at full blast combined with all the other instruments piled in basically swamped the vocals.  I think what makes this such a difficult song to mix is the sheer diversity of its arrangement: it juxtaposes some of the densest textures and some of the sparsest ones in the entire set.

It's such a densely layered song, in fact, that its project file comes to a staggering 1.71GB of waveforms, and that's with one crucial part still missing.  That would be the lead guitar, which this time will (hopefully) include an improvised solo to enhance the "C" section's build-up as well as (revised versions of) the familiar written lines.