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
Amongst The Pigeons 