Well, it’s been a while.

A lot has happened since I last updated this blog on a late winter day 10 years ago. Then, I had just started recording a demo of a new song, in the spare room of a house in Footscray I’d moved into a few months prior after two decades in the inner north. I would go on to record more demos in that room, and work some demos into serious recordings that, somehow, I would never finish. Three years on, I had a bucketload of demos (mostly recorded to enter them into songwriting competitions, which I never won but was a finalist or semi-finalist nine times) and a slew of unfinished recordings. I put the partly finished songs I was working on in 2010 for the Over and Over album up on Bandcamp as demos. I’d also finished recording an album with my band The Phosphenes, though it was yet to be released.

An idea from my partner at the time booted my out of my inertia: “Why not make an album out of all those songwriting competition finalists? They’re all great songs, and are already recorded.” So I abandoned the ambitious whole-band arrangements I had been painstakingly recording alone one instrument at a time and went back to those demos – adding a little extra here and there, remixing, and suddenly I had seven songs for an EP! (The other two had been turned into Phosphenes songs and were on our first full-length album recorded a few years before.) I took them around to Adam Dempsey to be expertly mastered and Bridesmaids was born. Finally I had released some solo recordings into the wild.

Two of the songs on Bridesmaids (Simple Song and Poster Boy) were from the abandoned Over and Over sessions, and a third (America) had been intended for the album. (America also appeared in quite a different form on the aforementioned new The Phosphenes’ album Finally, a friendly shore, which finally appeared in 2018.) Because of this, I considered the Over and Over project to be history – so when I returned to the more ambitious songs I’d been working on I envisaged them for a new album, to be titled Songs From the End of the World. But in 2019 we were evicted from our Footscray cottage and work on everything stopped while the herculean task of finding a new house and moving was undertaken.

Late 2019 found me setting up a new studio in the much larger spare room of the house we started renting in West Footscray. Before we knew it, the pandemic was on and with a series of lockdowns happening in 2020 and me being able to continue working my day job from home, I suddenly had a lot more spare time to get recording and writing again. I made pretty good progress, even releasing a dark synth-driven single in late 2020 and putting a bunch of demos for the album up on Bandcamp as a teaser. But then as 2021 unfolded, whole lot of stuff happened that took away my time and energy for continuing the work (though I did manage to record and release another song toward the end of that year). Over the next two years I was involved in a couple of other musical projects and transitioned from my day job to running my own one-person consultancy business, and Songs From the End of the World‘s hiatus continued.

But that’s changed now. My new life has settled, more of my time is my own, and a month or so ago I walked into my studio to recommence work on the project. However, listening back to what I had so far recorded, I distracted myself by also listening to the old Over and Over unfinished recordings – much closer to completion that the 2020 stuff – and decided that I would finish it first before getting back to Songs From the End of the World. I no longer felt that having released a few of the songs on other albums meant they could no longer be included. What’s wrong with having a few different versions of the same song out there? If it is good enough for Paul Kelly, it’s good enough for me.

So a few weeks ago I returned to Like Me. Like all the Over and Over songs, it’s almost finished: bass, guitars, harmonica and guide vocals are all recorded and edited; only drums, final vocals, and any additional instruments need to be recorded and then the whole thing needs to be mixed. I quickly came across one problem – the version of the software I used to record and edit the original recordings (the free open source DAW Ardour) is so old, I can’t reliably open the files with the current version – and when I can, all the edits are lost. But I took this as an opportunity – with fresh ears and more developed skills now, I can re-edit for the original takes. So I did this, using the demo bounces as a reference but only as a guide – I don’t want to necessarily recreate them, just find the best performance of the songs from within the raw material. After re-editing and remixing the song, I created a tempo map so I could make a click track that lines up with the subtle variations in timing in the original recordings. Using that click track, I recorded a drum part. This really brought the song alive! With that down, I did a bit of fine-tuning to the other tracks to correct a little sloppy timing here and there, and doubled the lead guitar part with a different guitar and amp to give it some extra punch. It sounds fantastic.

This song has a two-part instrumental section. The second part has a bluesy harmonica solo, but the first part was not complete – it has a guitar riff underpinning it but was waiting for an unspecified other lead instrument to go over the top. I came up with an idea of building up some layers of a number of different instruments doing different things, to form a slightly out-there crescendo into the bluesy harmonica bit that then goes into the bridge. This was a heap of fun: I spent 45 minutes tuning an autoharp and then recorded some dramatic autoharp chords, some slide guitar runs, a synth line (on a Stylophone!), some chord runs on a tenor guitar and some complementary ones on an emulated Fender Rhodes electric piano.

All that’s left to be done now is to record the lead vocals and some harmonies, and mix it all together. I’ll post that in part 9 when I get to it!