"Sweet Surrender" and "Holy War". . .
Work is progressing nicely here. I've just been fine tuning the Piano parts on "Sweet Surrender", getting just the right performance down for it. I had it completed once already this week, but I realized it had 100 % more feeling at 4 bpm slower than we originally suspected. Therefore I set about re-recording it. Since It had such better feeling to it at the new tempo, it inspired some changes to the original parts I had written. So, last night and today was spent going over it with a fine toothed comb to make sure it was just right. Now it's just about capturing it at it's best and I'm almost there. Boy this is gonna be good. I've gotten goosebumps several times while running through it and that's rare.
Jimmy will be able to sing the hell out of this . . .
The other night our meeting went very well, as did the writing session.
First we discussed and decided some things which I'll go over in next weeks post. Then we finished "Holy War". Actually, I had already finished it lyrically without knowing it.
When I first came up with it I had two verses.
Once we began working on the song together, I left out the second verse I originally had and wrote a new one in it's place. For whatever reason, I deemed the original one as substandard, so I never showed it to Jimmy. So here we are on Wednesday night finishing up the music and just needing a third verse to finish it all and I jokingly said - Y'know, I originally had another four lines for this. Jimmy said let's here 'em.
As I recalled what they were and said it - He looked at me with a half smile and said - There it is! What's wrong with that? I said - You actually like that? He said - Yeah.
I thought about it for a second and thought - Okay, it is better than I thought, plus it really fits as the third verse. So there it is - It definitely didn't fit as a second verse, but after writing everything else, it did fit as a third. Funny how that happens. Sometimes it just takes the conformation of someone else to realize that something is okay. Or just a new arrangement, or additional part. This is not the first time that's happened either. I do that a lot. I'll be really critical of something (Sometimes for no good reason at all) and I'll second guess it. I'll dump it before Jimmy hears it and every once in a while, one of those lines will come around again and actually works.
Now we just have to figure out the climax of the song, which is a double time section with a rather long guitar solo over it, that breaks back down into where it all began. We have the basic outline for it layed out, but getting it exactly right will take some work. It has almost a latin feel to it. We're not completely sure yet, but it may require a complete and complex time signature change for that section and then have to change back for the ending. (I guess that's our latent 'Rush' influence trying to come through). We also worked a bit on fine tuning the vocal melody on the chorus. Since I'm singing this one and have a terrible cough right now, you can guess how fun that was.
We have a couple of epic songs for the record so far and "Sweet Surrender" and "Holy War" are two more that somewhat fit in that category . . .
We decided that aside from finishing off a couple of songs we're already in the middle of writing & recording - we will only write five more new songs for this record before we stop the writing sessions completely and just focus on getting the recording finished. If anything just pops out of one of us, like "Wounded" did, then fine, but we now have all the quality material we need to choose from in making this double record and it's non - album singles. . .
- Bret.
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