Here’s a song I made this last weekend. I’ve always been a big fan of low production songs that reflect humanity rather than shiny machinery and polished personas. Even some of the more New Wave music I’m making is meant to reflect this kind of production value.
This one is as low production values as you can get, and it was completely ad-libbed. Inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska album, which was a low-budget home recording affair in 1982, I’ve been thinking of just turning on the recorder and letting fly.
So that’s what I did with this one. The pickup in my Taylor acoustic guitar recently broke, so I have to record it using a microphone. But I only have one microphone. So I positioned it so I could more-or-less record both my voice and the guitar at the same time. Then I just started playing and singing whatever came off the top of my head. My thoughts initially went to Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, and I think that’s kind of the vibe in the end. I just went with it, and this is the result.
These are the lyrics which came to my mind and I just sang them out:
So you think you can see, just the way it should be,
So you think you can see, just the way it should be.
You think you know. You think you’ve got it all worked out.
Before you can even sing.
You find that you don’t really know. You don’t really know.
You don’t know what you think you do. It’s far more, far more, than you ever dreamed.
Than you ever dreamed.
It’s very much reflective of how I feel at 47. It shifts between feeling powerless about life—we think we’ve got it all worked out, and then we don’t—to seeing the wonder of it all.
Life has so much beauty and mystery about it, and it’s so vast and complex. Just think of how every decision you make affects others and can even reverberate long after you’re gone. God has really given us so much freedom that is both daunting and exciting. It’s all so complex and huge that it’s far more than we can even dream. To see the beauty in all this requires a shift in perspective—one I’m learning to make.
I recorded this in my garage, so none of this is at all how it should be done. After the recording I found the microphone was doing some odd clipping, even though I checked the volume beforehand. I think it has something to do with the latency on my DAW. But I liked the song and the complete ad-lib nature of it, and I thought the clipping can even add some character—reminding me of listening to my dad’s Pink Floyd records on vinyl when I was a kid. So I loaded in some plugins to add more warmth and dirt, threw on some reverb and a tiny bit of delay, and this is the song. Just push play above.
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