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.