Jaron's Journal
| August 24, 2012, 11:11 AM Recording The Song "Happening Now" | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Alright ladies and gents, It's time to discuss the recording details of "Circus"....er, I mean "Plain of Dreams." Wait! "Happening Now!" Listen to the finished "Happening Now" song
The story of "Happening Now" began happening on 8-28-2008. The simple drum beat of the song was something that I'd been apt to tap out in the years preceding this date. But upon this date, I decided that I wanted to form a song around it, and moreover, I wanted it to be a circus-y sounding song. So I creatively codenamed this song "Circus." The following day, I came up with a circus-y chord progression and laid it down on my electric guitar. I then sang/hummed out some nonsense lyrics. The result was this. A week later, during the first official Dark Forest recording session with Jesse described here, Jesse and I laid down electric guitar, bass, keyboard drums and vocals for this song. This was officially the first Dark Forest song Jesse and I worked on together. Ironically none of the takes from this session actually survived into the final mix. Not a one! But it did give us the strong, essential structure for all of the aforementioned pieces which were subsequently re-recorded in the following years. The result was this. Take special note of the chorus that I didn't yet know how to sing. Jesse said this version made it sound too broadway-ish. I agreed. When the lost year of 2009 rolled around, a little bit of effort did go into this song. Firstly I came up with a bridge on 6-9-2009 that was not used. Lastly Jesse and I had another recording session on the weekend of July 10-12. At that point I had a firm structure for how the song was going to go, so Jesse simply recorded his electric guitar pieces around that structure and came up with the bridge. I also attempted a harmony on the verse, but this went nowhere. This song then slept for eighteen months. It awoke on New Years Day in 2011, right along with a firm resolution to finish the album. On that day, and for many of the following days, I worked on laying down drums (on my brand new drum set), vocals and organ. And having worked on rewriting the lyrics, the song had a new chorus and a new title, confusingly "Plain Of Dreams." But there was a problem. I couldn't quite figure out how best to sing this song. But I made several attempts until I was decently satisfied with the result. David and I cobbled together a bass piece that weekend (January 7-9) and mixed this with what I had thus far. This was the final result. Not bad, but there were a few problems. Firstly, the chorus was entirely too wordy, so I chose to rewrite it. And the rewritten chorus didn't contain the phrase "Plain Of Dreams," so now the song title was nonsensical. After much thought, I decided to retitle the song "Happening Now." And secondly, I just wasn't happy with the vocals on the song. They were a little pitchy and they didn't have that punch that I was expecting. At this time, I was listening to alot of Jake Russell Band tunes, and after hearing one of them, I thought to myself, "I really want 'Happening Now' to sound like that." So I decided, "Why not?" I asked Jake if he could sing the song as an experiment and he consented. We layed his vocals down in July, 2011; and I was pleased with result! That same month, I got with Jesse again so we could lay down a full version of his original bass piece instead of the more choppy version David and I had cobbled together. And in May, 2011, I decided to sing some lines by myself and/or with Jake to add some more punch and variety to the song. That's it! I'll leave you with an instrumental missing link demo, and I'll get around to posting about the actual "Plain Of Dreams" song that appears on the album sometime in the next two weeks.
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