The last song! Finally, I can get back to blogging about whatever it is I usually blog about. The entire collection fit on one side of a 60-minute tape. Do you even know what a tape is? Jesus.
And for the big ending, the song itself was a full-on, pants-down confessional. Very simply this song was my suicide note, describing why and how, more or less, and I think I even considered that as a title, but opted for subtlety instead, borrowing the title from Nirvana's song Dive.
The bass part and the guitar part in the intro started as two completely separate snippets. At some point, I think I was like, "Hmm, I wonder..." and tried playing them together and they happened to fit together really well, so I kept it like that.
I think both bass and guitar are going through the Super Phaser in the intro. I was also pleased with myself by how that intro bass motif became a vocal line later in the song, I think that worked rather well, flatter myself not.
The bass part in the verses is a full-on slap bass part and I think I ran it through both Auto-Wah and Super Phaser, which was risky because of the possibility of effects overload, but I think I was going for "bombastic" in regards to sound for this song.
I think the Compression effect also helped keeping those two effects from totally blowing up. I think Auto-Wah and Super Phaser are about frequency sweeps, and if certain frequencies come together and peak at the wrong point, it gets ugly. The Compression keeps everything contained.
The drum part in the B sections I want to comment on, but unfortunately I'm just geeking out and this will probably make no sense to anyone. It was actually a pretty technically tricky part, based on a 16th note hand pattern on the hi-hat with alternate strokes of both left and right hands hitting the ride (right hand) and crash bell (left hand) in a crazy pattern that I was only able to come up with due to practicing steel drum music grooves from my time with the steel drum band in college. The snare drum hits kinda, sorta reveal the latin influence of the pattern.
And oh, also in the B sections, I had trouble coming up with a bass line that I liked, and what I settled for was a direct, conscious rip-off of Paul McCartney's amazing bass line of Hey Bulldog. They're played a little differently and with different roots, but the relative tones and rhythm are directly from "Hey Bulldog".
I think the lyrics are pretty self-explanatory. As for the narration recitation in the background at the beginning and the end, it's taken from Jeanette Winterson's book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. The full passage is as below, the bold sections are what I'm reciting underneath the song:
(excerpt from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson, pp. 170-171)
". . . But where was God now, with heaven full of astronoughts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky. If the servants hadn't rushed in and parted us, I might have been disappointed, might have snatched off the white samite to find a bowl of soup. As it is, I can't settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never the destroyed. That is why they are unfit for romantic love. There are exceptions and I hope they are happy.
The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met. If you want to find out the circumference of an oil drop, you can use lycopodium powder. That's what I'll find. A tub of lycopodium powder, and I will sprinkle it on to my needs and find out how large they are. Then when I meet someone I can write up the experiment and show them what they have to take on. Except they might have a growth rate I can't measure, or they might mutate, or even disappear. One thing I am certain of; I do not want to be betrayed, but that's quite hard to say, casually, at the beginning of a relationship. It's not a word people use very often, which confuses me, because there are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else's."
Mind you, this passage I had posted elsewhere and had to dig for a while to find. I'm not that narcissistic that I dug this out for this post.
The file is over 5 and a half minutes long, but the song is less than five minutes. The tag at the end is the end of the recording of the Ode to a Sinkhole track. With songs that fade out, do you ever wonder what went on in the studio on the master tape? I think it's something like this. The recording goes on until it falls apart. And apparently there was a finger-snapping part in that song.
Clean the slate, try to clear my mind
Find a way to start over from the star...
The starting line
Leave behind what I've built thus far
Finally resolved to end this game of love charades
Back to the cave
And pull out the plug from the VCR and the TV screen
Leave my socks on the sand below the stars
And look around to see where the fires are
The sound of waves plead for me
The swim that never ends begins here on the beach
Clean the slate, clear my mind
Sound of waves, leave behind
Hold my breath, close my eyes
The shock of the first chill will only last until mourning
Opting out, cash in my dying deed
It's just a simple trade off between distinct realities
Body parts, functions and feelings
Everything reeling and fading out from here and now and I know how
To pull out the plug and watch the water go round and down the drain
Don't look back, don't think of crying now
With a ziplock bag around my neck to weigh me down
All I love is here with me
The stars, the sound, a gun and all my memories
Running start, take a dive
No one here gets out alive
Racing back, my whole life
Flashing before my eyes
For weeks it's been driving me crazy
I want to find some way to trust another lie
Nothing romantic that could be believed and I
Keep in the feeling that's rotting me from inside
She'll rest in peace with the newly deceased and cross my mind
Sometimes I think this is one big joke
And god knows that I've been at the end of my rope
For seven years it took to figure this out
She's laughing at my train of doubt about
Being found and being unidentified
Still concerned with all the details left behind
When I leave to find you
You'll know me when you see me, you'll see the signs
