Happy Monday Everyone!
My album "Legacy" is available now on CD, high-resolution digital download, and MP3 from iTunes, Google, and Amazon. Check out my website for links to buying your copy today!
Starting today, I'm going to post a daily "story behind the song" for each of my songs on the album. I'll be giving you the insights into what inspired the song, why I gave the song its title, some of my anecdotes from the recording sessions, and maybe a little more.
As I've mentioned previously, "Legacy" is a collection of songs that I had written about 15 years ago. Some of my closest family and friends have likely heard versions of these songs over the years, but this collection is the first "official" release of my music that I've made available to the general public. The songs on "Legacy" are a complete re-working of all of these old songs: new arrangements, new recordings, new interpretations. So even if you've heard the old songs before, you've never heard them like this!
Today's track: "Spheres"
I've had a near-lifelong love affair with astronomy, space, and the cosmos. The name "Spheres" was a reference to the major celestial objects in our solar system -- the Sun, planets, and moons. I envisioned "Spheres" as the soundtrack to a journey through our solar system, and I think the new version still holds onto that original vision.
When I first wrote "Spheres", I was listening to a lot of very synthesizer-oriented music, like Tangerine Dream, Crystal Method, Jan Hammer, Depeche Mode, and much more, and my home studio was dominated by over 20 synthesizers!
The first version of "Spheres" was 100% synthesizer, and it was a lush, layered orchestration of over 30 different individual synthesizer parts. One technique I learned in my orchestration and arrangement courses in college -- and a practice perfected by Tangerine Dream -- was the doubling or tripling of individual melodic lines using a wide variety of sounds. The result was a unique and highly complex timbre. "Spheres" was full of these lines. The harmony & song structure of "Spheres" was always one of my favorites from my cache of old songs, as it weaved in and out of several keys, but always managed to stay cohesive.
With the new version of "Spheres", I started with nothing more than a skeletal structure of the the song and the bass line. I always liked the bass guitar part from the original version, and that's quite literally the only hold over from the original version that made it to the new version without significant changes. Building on the bass line and entirely new drum parts, I gradually added bits and pieces for the old synthesizer parts, but I did so very sparingly. My intention was to create a backdrop of drums, bass, and synths that could be reasonably played by an actual band -- without requiring 20 guest synth players.
The final piece of the puzzle was the guitar parts. This took weeks. The original song had no guitar at all, and for that matter, it really wasn't a terribly melodic song. I ended up creating a rough mix of the song with just the bass, drums, and synth parts, and every day I spent some time improvising and noodling around over the chord changes. I was almost to the point of abandoning the song because everything I was doing seemed to not fit very well.
It was finally the day I had set aside for recording the guitar parts, and I felt like I was coming into the studio empty-handed. As I was warming up, I decided to play along with the backing tracks, and BOOM!!! It happened. The verse melody, the intro, the crazy guitar solo parts... they just seemed to fall out of my guitar. We quickly went into recording mode and captured what I was doing, and some of what you hear on the album are my first takes. It was as if something switched a light on in my head.
The guitar tracks for "Spheres" were pretty much the last guitar tracks I recorded for the album. As I was starting the mixing and mastering phases, those big, powerful guitar chords that start the song out just begged for the song to be track #1 for the album.
So long story short, "Spheres" went from a song that was almost on the chopping block to the song that would end up leading the charge and opening the album.
Let me know if you have any questions or comments about "Spheres".
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