Some songs come about very quickly and can be finished in a couple of hours, others take weeks, months and even years to get right. My current single ‘If I close my eyes I am worried I will fall asleep and not wake up again’ is one of those that took a very long time.
It is also a song that changed a lot from its first incarnation, to what you hear now and I thought it would be interesting to share that process with you.
I first started working on ‘If I close my eyes…’ in the summer of 2012, whilst demoing songs for the follow up to ‘Get Amongst It’. The original demo version was a mellow, bright, floaty, instrumental tune. I knew I wanted vocals on it so I sent the track over to my friend Piers to add to it.
A few months later Piers returned the track with some amazing lyrics/vocals and an awesome driving guitar line. These were all recorded over the original instrumental track I had provided. I then had to do a lot of work to do in order to make this new song sound right.
I spent ages reworking the track and could not for the life of me get it right. So, in the end I completly stripped it back to just the vocals and guitar before building it up again. I created totally new beats to lay under the guitar and vocals and started to add back some of the original demo elements into it. I also added a lot of new noises and played around with all kinds of effects and filters.
I have somewhat simplified what I actually did, but believe me it took months and months to make it work.
As a finished song, I totally love it and really feel it has the right balance between the vocals, guitar, beats and colourful noises.
I actually ended up releasing the original version last year as the B-Side to ‘Boing’ – I renamed it to ‘Version One’. I did this because I really liked how the original demo version sounded in its own right and how different it was from the latest single.
You can here the original here :
And now the new version :
https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=3216096467/size=small/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/track=1079624985/transparent=true/
I hope you can hear elements of the original in the new version, but also enjoy them both as individual tracks.
I’d be interested to hear what you think
