Happy Wednesday, my fine fellow Internet denizens!
Today's "story behind the song" focuses on track number 8 from my album "Legacy", entitled "Racing The Wind".
This song hails from around 1997, but it was untitled for a couple years. One of the unique things about this song was that even though the mid-late 1990s was a period of time when I was writing a lot of synthesizer based music, this song was written on and intended to be played by guitar. On the earliest versions of the song, the verses were in a major key, but I wasn't as fond of the mood of the song -- it was a bit too sing-songy and happy-go-lucky. Very not me. When I switched it over to a minor key, it took on a classical-influenced melodic quality which better suited the song.
One day while I was driving on a stretch of freeway on Oahu that was uncharacteristically mostly empty (this was weird, even 20 years ago), I noticed that I was keeping pace with the rapid-moving shadows of clouds that were being cast onto the road. I felt like I was racing with the wind, and this song happened to be playing -- the title was born!
As with several of the songs on this album, one of my goals in re-arranging and re-recording the song was to make it more possible to perform the song using a standard band (i.e., having 20 keyboard players isn't normal). So as with many of the other songs on the album, for "Racing The Wind" this translated to combining or eliminating redundant synthesizer parts, and distilling the song down to its essential elements.
This song features a guitar solo where I decided to pull all the stops and just SHRED. The first attempts to recreate the guitar solo from the original version of the song just felt lifeless -- it was too stiff and structured. I felt like if we're really racing here, we gotta go FAST! 😎
That's the deep-dive on "Racing The Wind". Thanks for reading, and I'll see you tomorrow with the next installment of "story behind the song".
No comments:
Post a Comment