The Day it All Went to Pieces (2020 Version)

Not sure about this one.

This was written as part of the 2012 RPM Challenge. I had tried RPM five times prior to 2012 and had failed miserably every time. About a week into February that year I had actually decided to call RPM quits in general. I was tired of failing and I just wasn’t feeling it that year. I had also recently picked up an iPad 2 about that time. Somehow I decided that if I could pull off all of the work on the iPad, I would stick with the Challenge. This song and one other came right after that and I’ve managed to finish RPM every year since.

So it’s important in that I somehow took inspiration from it, and it also marked the official moment when I put my 8-track tape deck away and fully embraced the land of the computerized DAW. I had done a few songs in Garageband prior to this, but in my mind this is the moment everything changed.

Musically I was going for a Ringo Starr kinda vibe on the drums. The intro (and ending) were meant to be a tip of the cap to those slightly latin grooves Ringo used to play in the early days. Did I lift this directly from “I Feel Fine”? I might have. Lyrically I hadn’t given up on writing songs with actual meanings yet, and this one was supposed to be a metaphor for getting old told in terms of my first band’s break up. It doesn’t really work, but who cares.

As for this version… I think it’s the first of these re-do’s that may not be as good as the original, and the original sounds like garbage. I just feel like I’ve lost something in the translation. I don’t dislike this one per se, but it just feels like something is missing from it. It lost it’s mojo somewhere along the way.

All of the guitar parts are a Gibson ES-335 Pro into a Klon KTR into both a Vox AC15 and a Fender Bassbreaker 15. The lead guitar parts added a Wampler Faux Tape Echo after the Klon for a little slap back.

It was a lifetime ago
We had it all In The Palm of our hands
We knew all there was to know
We were the best of the bands

There came a day when it all went to pieces
We never really knew why
Hard to take as the return decreases
No longer made sense to try

Something like this always happens to me
All right there but somehow I never see