10.27.2010

Track-by-Track: Days to Begin

I promised to blog about each track individually, and here's the first. I figured I'd write about each track in chronological order, rather than album order.

The first song recorded was "Days to Begin," and I scanned in my notebook where I wrote the lyrics:

The idea for the music side of the track came from my good friend Pete Hemberger. He had sent me an email about how we should try to record songs that were "simple and clean" and used "C, F, and G."

I took his advice quite literally. Those are the only 3 chords in the song.

For the lyrics, I wanted to play around with the idea of setting out on the task of recording a song. (You could see this as a lyrical homage to "25 or 6 to 4," that is, a song about writing a song.) I had set a goal of writing one song every day this summer. That goal quickly fell through, but at the time of these lyrics, I had that idea in my head.

I'm a big fan of puns and the "dazed" vs. "days" in the lyrics vs. title I thought was very apt. I was extremely dazed by the idea of writing a song a day, and it took me literally days to begin the process of writing songs.

I quickly did realize that I had "overfill[ed] [my] cup" in song writing, but, like the song says, I kept "going on."

On the recording side of things, the song was a strange process. I initially recorded the guitar and vocals at the same time, with the acoustic being recorded with the built-in pick-up and the vocals through a separate mic. The vocals sound whispered because 1) I think it fits the feel of the song, and 2) I recorded this one really late at night while Emma was sleeping.

I went back recently and re-recorded the guitar track. I wasn't as pleased with the initial one when I went back and listened to it closely. Of course, Garageband (have I mentioned that it's the greatest piece of software ever created?) made this easy to do.

The outro guitar melody was just the acoustic recorded through the pick-up with a slight phaser effect on it. Nothin' fancy.

So now that you know way more than you ever wanted to about the song, check it out at the link below (I've posted all the tunes on YouTube to facilitate a better listening experience):



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