Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Madredeus, Skylines, 28 Minutes & The Big Word

Went to the Usher Hall and secured tickets for Anne and me to see Madredeus. My fears re possible cancellation were confirmed by the fact that I was able to get seats dead centre in the second front row. Not to worry – cue much listening to the music of Madredeus over the next few weeks.

At home I toyed again with the idea of returning to OOTB tomorrow and so ran through some songs. The CD Singles still aren’t ready so I though t I might play some stuff from “Anotherhappyday”.

I tried “I Re-Arranged The House”, one of the few songs I’ve written that I can actually play all the way through without reverting to a music & lyric sheet, “Skylines Full of Cranes” which is on the second OOTB CD “Open House” and “Another Happy Day”. The first two sounded good but I abandoned “AHD” half way through.

Last night Jamie told me a story about “Skylines”. On purchasing Jamie’s CD, Scott Renton, one of the new committee members at OOTB, had told him that, when he got it home, he was going to go straight to Jamie’s version of “Skylines” because Scott’s girlfriend, and her friend, had put together an entire dance routine for the song, acting out all the lyrics. Now that I’d like to see someday!

The cold’s a bit better now, so I may go along tomorrow but probably only to get an early slot, play and come home. I’ll probably do at least one of the “Deeperdown” songs.

The rest of the night was spent on two projects:-

Project 1. Finalising the track listings for the CD singles which now look like this:-

Deeperdown track
Live track
Soundscape Edit
plus
Three tracks from the old “Songs of the Sombre Reptiles” series (Vols 1-4) which I recorded in the early 90’s and which are all now deleted.

The three "SOTSR" songs will be a “long” track, a “short” track and one to make the timing up to around 28 minutes.

I have timed each EP to last around 28 minutes. I don’t know why....

Project 2. Transferring the recordings of The Big Word on to CD. This involved listening back to the whole night and inserting track breaks. I decided to have each performer's entire set as one track. Ian would like to have everything on one CD but this is not going to be feasible as there’s around 110 minutes of material. I’ll give him the whole night on two discs and he can perhaps choose which poems to use. There’s a lot of swearing in there and the CD would have to bear some sort of warning sticker I feel. It was good to hear the poems again, and I found myself laughing out loud several times.

I'll give the discs to Ian on Sunday when we reconvene to record some vocals for his CD....

No comments: