I’ve been writing songs for a long time. As long as I can remember really. I used to make up songs as a kid with my brother while we did yard work and chores around the house. Usually choruses about the job itself and verses about how I didn’t want to be doing them. I got ahold of my guitar when I was maybe around 14 years old and soon after picked up a bright teal Tascam 414 Tape Cassette Portastudio mkII 4 track recorder, which has been long since discontinued.
This guy:
I used to scratch out simple song ideas in my East Tennessee bedroom and wear those tapes out. You could record whatever you wanted and chase ideas down for hours and hours until the tape turned to static or inevitably got caught up in the reels. I’d record for days on end for no one but myself.
Fast forward many years and here we are. I love recording. Maybe more now than ever. And a lot of times I’ll just do it for myself. I love the process of it. How it starts on a canvas of absolute silence and slowly builds and mutates itself until you walk out of that same room with something that didn’t exist before. Something that was in your head. Your heart. Your mind. You’ve pulled it out of the sky and can hand that feeling to someone else and have them interpret their own story on top of it.
I hope that feeling never goes away.
So here’s a song I wrote and recorded in one night. Funny enough it’s all built around bass because all my guitars were up at our North Hollywood practice space and my pal Austin’s bass was the only instrument in the room. I built the progression, had a couple scratch vocal ideas and threw it all down in a hurry so I wouldn’t forget it. I ended up going back at the end to try and re-cut those vocal ideas, but the rawness of the first takes are what I actually really like about the song so they stuck. The idea behind this song was just to do whatever felt right in the moment and let it stick. No overdubs, no perfecting. No overthinking it. Just letting the song bloom into itself, just like it used to all those years ago. A few hours of tracking and some simple drum ideas later and here you have it. I’m falling back in love with idea of music being art. Pure and only for the sake of expression. Just letting it happen and not overthinking the process.
So here I am popping out the tape and handing it to you. Hope you enjoy.