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!

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.

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.

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 Plan

Broadly speaking, there are three areas in which the Escapade material needs improving.  These are the production, the lyrics, and the way the material is framed.

Production

Since the release of the Escapades, several people have cited Frank Zappa's Synclavier experiments of the 1980s as an example of the computer-music approach "done right".  Consequently, in preparation for this project I decided to familiarize myself with some of this stuff.

Actually not as misleading an album title as some have insinuated, I think.

I think the difference lies in Zappa's artistic aims (even at his most purely musical) being significantly different from mine.  The atmosphere the Synclavier creates is an eerie one, and Zappa tends to lean into that.  The unsettling mental picture I get is of a computer engaging in some sort of Satanic ritual.  Certainly none of the programmed music remotely aims for the kind of rarefied beauty so much of my work goes for: the track that does, "St. Etienne", doesn't feature the Synclavier at all, and is instead edited down from a surprisingly moving live rendition of "Drowning Witch".  It's lovely, and the effect of the preceding "Damp Ankles" segueing into it is almost cathartic.

The obvious conclusion is that while the computer-music production approach isn't inherently a bad one, it is a poor fit for me.  Fortunately, other developments in recent years have made it so that I can't pretend that I need to make music that way anymore.  The huge game-changer is the fact that it's now possible to work with other musicians remotely, meaning that the high quotient of classical specialization among my immediate acquaintances is no longer a barrier.  Moreover, it's already become clear that my grounding in classical is eminently transferrable, as several of the artists I've worked with on other projects have warmly complimented the clarity of my notation.

So this time, there will be a healthy dose of real guitars, real basses, and real drums!  I shall be playing piano and synthesizer.  There'll probably still be some programming, too, but only for parts where that's actually the right choice.  (Some string parts in "Faraway Island" come to mind.)

I'll probably be handling about half the vocals.  I basically have the same range as Mark Knopfler, so it's not like my voice is unworkable for this material, but I do have a plaintive intensity in my higher registers that probably isn't the best fit for a lot of it.  And more generally, I've known for years that my voice is more naturally a soul voice than a rock one.

To the surprise of some I don't use anything more sophisticated than Audacity for mixing these days.  While this free program used to be a bit of a joke, it's evolved over the years into something quite respectable.  It doesn't offer a lot of post-production gimmicks, but I've never been wild about such things anyway.  Moreover, by forcing myself to do things the hard way, I greatly reduce the risk of falling into the mixing complacency that so crippled Escapade 2.  Finally, my background in classical (in which a rigid tempo is rarely desirable) means that thinking in seconds, rather than in beats, at the mixing stage feels normal to me.

Lyrics

The lyrics will be re-worked much more ruthlessly here than on Escapade 2, where (notwithstanding "Look and See") I only ironed out some of the more flagrant verbal creases.  It's been so long since I originally wrote this material, that my thoughts and feelings on what I'm writing about have become far more nuanced.  This different perspective may well make it easier to come up with enough verses to fill the songs without having to repeat anything: I feel this could improve "Faraway Island" in particular.

"Modern Art" will be instrumental this time, probably with the melody on nylon-string acoustic guitar or something.  While the author of the text did give me his permission to turn it into a song all those years ago, I feel guilty that some of the mockery that met the Escapade version spilled over onto the actual poem, too.  I just don't want to fan those flames again.

Presentation

As Escapade 2 made painfully clear, the original running order bogs the album down.  Setting the scene is all very well, but only one song is needed to do that.  Since most of "March for the Age" is going to be cut, I no longer have the option of using that slab of electronic bombast to open the proceedings.  And "My Next Escape" isn't really opener material without it.

Therefore, instead I'll be opening with "Days to Midnight".  It's fast, it's catchy, and in the context of this project it has the advantage of being a song that requires (relatively speaking) little attention besides lyrics.

On both extant Escapades, "Days to Midnight" is followed by "Modern Art".  I, however, have always seen "Modern Art" as middle-of-album material more than anything, so that won't do this time.  I think a controlled amount of contrast is needed.  Another fast song would throw the whole album off-balance, while "Look and See" would be too jarring.  That leaves only one (perhaps surprising) choice: "Faraway Island".

After this, "Modern Art" falls into place as the "side A" closer, taking its rightful place as a relaxed, moody breather of sorts.

"Them", in any version, is going to be quite a wake-up call of a song.  On Escapade it follows two slow-to-mid-tempo songs in a row, and I think that works quite well.  Therefore, "Them" will retain its place as the "side B" opener.

"Them" is fast but quite dark, so I think the best way to follow it is with something that keeps the energy level up but in a more relaxed way.  The Escapade 2-exclusive "One of My Goof Attacks" is perfect for this.

Possibly my favourite juxtaposition on either Escapade is that of "One of My Goof Attacks" and "Look and See" on 2.  Moreover, retaining this transition also makes "Look and See" the penultimate song on the whole album, giving it a role akin to what "Faraway Island" tried to be before.  Its more vulnerable tone compared to the visionary "Faraway Island" makes it far more suitable, if anything.  Even the keys that "Look and See" and the "Escapes" are in seem to have been hinting at this all along.

Finally, there's the matter of the "Escapes" themselves.  I do think the long C-sharp major chord that ends "My Last Escape" is the right ending for the album, and (hopefully) won't make me sound like such a Pink Floyd wannabe in this new structure.  Therefore, I think the thing to do is to rework the "Escapes", together with salvageable material from "March for the Age" and "After the Party", into a suite to close the proceedings.

I'm not planning to call the album Escapade 3.  That would just draw attention to the fact that it took me three goes to have it not sound like the sort of thing that gives home-made music a bad name.  Instead, unless I change my mind before finishing the first song, this album will be called Chronicles of a Dead End - yes, the nickname I gave to the set after coming to terms with 2 having failed.  This title appeals to me because, while it might not have been the musical dead end I once thought, the place in my life the material came from was an emotional dead end.  I've always loved a good double meaning.

In summary...

Chronicles of a Dead End (?2024) track listing:

1. Days to Midnight
2. Faraway Island
3. Modern Art
4. Them
5. One of My Goof Attacks
6. Look and See
7. Escapade

Song titles are subject to change, too.