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.