I’ve been warming up for RPM by digging out old songs and recording new demos. I have done this the last two years as well. This year most of the focus has been on 1997-2000 when I was in a band called Prime Meridian with Mike and Maria (and John and Dave and Leah and Tracey all at varying times). I’ve got six of those songs ready to mix and I think I might try and crank out two or three more as well. I have three old RPM songs left over from last January, and both last March and April had songs that qualify as well so I’ll use those as well when the time comes to make a playlist out of this stuff.
I’ve also started digitizing old cassette tapes and I’ve found a few decent sounding songs there as well. I started working on two of them today. They were both written and recorded in the MIDI room at Northeast Broadcasting School, probably in 1994 or 95. Those two along with another that was actually used by Prime Meridian (and might have been used by Break Even too if I’d been up for it) were things I’d written on a keyboard and pieced together with other random things to make songs. Kinda like what I do now with RPM. Actually, there were probably 20 such songs before I left that job, but only 3-5 or so are worth listening too. Back then though I wasn’t thinking in terms of actual songs. These were arranged many months after they were recorded in the sequencer. I also had never really been a singer before.
One thing I learned a couple of years ago when I was messing with demoing songs from the band I played in back in high school is that we never took little things like breathing into account. Well, that was still the case in the mid-90s too. I just finished tracking one of those songs and OH MY GOD MY HEAD HURTS! I have been doubling all of my vocal tracks this time (rhythm guitar too) and the vocal lines are so long that they all cram in together without any room for breathe. I’ve been breaking things up so that I sing one line on one track and the next on another, and then I double everything. I don’t know how I ever could have considered putting something like this together as a song. It’s so ridiculously difficult to sing. No one could ever do it live. Ever.
All of the singing has literally given me a headache.
Ouch, babie.
Inside the Red Head's Head 