Coming out of 13 Months In 6 Minutes, there's this other song that briefly pops up, settles in & immediately begins fading out. It doesn't have a name and there's obv. no start ID/track number. And sorta like the accidental radio-preacher recording (yesterday's story) at the start of Per Second Second, the drums that come in to seemingly play along with this song were what was actually already there, on the tape almost a minute after the end of the basic tracks of 13 Months, the remnant of some other song's take that was tried and (mostly) discarded. Listening now, it sounds like it might've been an alt. take of Ex-Grille Confection.
When I'd have this one up on blocks to work on, & I'd be writing/recording guitars or bass or whatever, the ADAT tape would reach the end of the song, sometimes I'd continue playing, working out whatever part I was doing at the time & this orphaned drum track would come in and start playing. Over time, I began to play along with it & eventually gravitated to playing the chorus to an older song I'd never recorded along with it each time it came around.
Eventually having decided to create a new 'song' by adding this old chorus over the drums, the difficulty was in connecting them (the 13 Months song end & this drums-only 'song' w/ the new/old chorus). They're almost a minute apart & are at different tempos. And because this was ADAT not computer (see meadowlands trivia post #1 from the other day if you're feeling too awake & non-drowsy), there's no click track, no way to visually see the pending orphaned drum-entry on a screen or to cut/paste/move it earlier.
So I spent a good amount of time moving between writing a 2nd section (that comes first, the two oblique guitar parts (the one goes up, the other down & the eventual vocals double those)) & figuring out an arrangement that worked connecting the two songs, while navigating the tempo difference. That was actually the hard part. Recording one guitar straight through to act as the breadcrumbs took a LOT of tries (ha) but at least it was closed-ended work, i.e. it was clear when it finally lined up & worked. The whole thing, as I remember took me a week. Jesus.
The post-mortem: so listening just now, you hear the two-part guitar come in at 5:39, play its figure 1x in tempo w/ the 13 Months song, then play it a 2nd time (at 5:46) but beginning to speed up to meet the oncoming faster train of the eventual drums-only song. At 5:50 there's a third time through, now w/ a later-added rhythm guitar fading in to create the illusion that this was all 'supposed' to happen, joined by tambourine (I also added after to patch the hole to the drums-only, furthering the dumb illusion).
That's one verse down (ha...are you filled again with regret that you've read this far?). At 5:55, 2nd x through the verse, now w/ vocals & at 6:11 the micro-chorus starts as those drums finally settle in for the missing song/take and everything immediately moves to fade-out.
Exeunt omnes.
Of all the ridiculous work I did on the record, this is one of the things of which I'm hilariously most proud. And because I never printed them, and because someone was asking yesterday, here are most of the words to that whole connector-y song:
Maybe that's enough / there may be faster guns / maybe I give up //
Maybe money isn't coming / maybe last ditches are done /
Maybe married counts as running / then ready?, let's run together... //
the last line, I just can't remember & can't tell. Might be "I'm going back in time"
Tomorrow, shorter, promise.