Confusing

Robert James

This was the third song I started working on this month and it’s the 15th song finished. What does that tell you?

I liked it a lot when I first came up with the idea. When I put the rhythm guitars down it started to feel like it wasn’t meeting what I heard in my head. When I did the vocals it completely fell apart and crushed my soul. I’m not a singer. I don’t enjoy singing lead (though singing harmony in my band is a blast) and I don’t feel I’m any good at it. I can do it, I just don’t do it as well as someone who can actually sing would do it. Get it?

Anyway, I wrote this out ahead of time and when I actually sat down to record it I couldn’t pull it off. The verses in particular broke my spirit. I ended up rewriting the melody on mic because I just couldn’t pull off what I wrote originally… and what I wrote originally wasn’t hard. I usually give myself a guide track for the melody. I play it out on piano and then sing along. More often than not that helps me stay on pitch. It didn’t work this time. I was all over the map. I actually added harmonies to each section then went back and redid the lead so it would help to lock me into pitch. It almost worked.

By the time I had the vocals finished I had already decided that this was going on the dropped songs list. While I was mixing it though, I decided to monkey around with it to see if I could improve it, and I think I did. I put a lot of sauce onto the rhythm guitars and it filled things out in a way that I liked. I did the same to the vocals and it helped too. Could it be that I actually succeeded in my attempt to “fix it in the mix”? Probably not, but it’s not as bad as I feared it would be.

The guitars are all Gibson ES-335 through both a Vox AC15 and a Fender Bassbreaker 15 (dual mono). The rhythm guitar used a Ryra The Klone and the lead used a cheap little Mosky Black Rat which sounded surprisingly good to me.

The nature sounds in the outro came from here:
https://freesound.org/people/greysound/sounds/32655/

Verse
For a time
for a day or two
Need a sign
something else to do
Make it mine
then give it to you
We have to get through this

Chorus
It’s overwhelming me, confusing
but what else could it be, unmoving
It’s all consuming, too much for me
There is no guarantee, undoing