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.