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!

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.

"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.

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.

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.

The island appears on the skyline

No, I can't say I knew this day would come, in that I couldn't be sure that the acoustic guitar part for "Faraway Island" would turn out as well as it did!  I'm particularly impressed with the guitarist's attention to detail in the dynamics, which as a bonus means I should be able to get away with using little volume-envelope trickery (maybe even none at all?) in the mixing of this part.

Speaking of, I noticed during the session that a few synthesizer tones were more penetrating than I thought, so I mixed those parts a bit quieter while I was at it.

In the coda, I'm particularly struck by how the bright, clean sound of the steel-string acoustic guitar means that the switch to the Phrygian mode here doesn't (to me, anyway) have the sinister connotations this scale often does.  Instead it's more of a sudden rush of exotic warmth, contrasting the contemplative mood of the rest of the piece.  At the same time, the fact that it's the same instrument means that it doesn't sound out of place as a conclusion.

Anyway, as with the drums in "Days to Midnight" I felt that this was the part that unlocked the emotions in this song.  I was actually moved to tears, at one point, while mixing the guitar in - and that's with the "vocal" still being a placeholder MIDI flute.  It's very telling that, even as of the 2020s, MIDI instruments are still (at best) a mixed bag.