How It Came To Be...

I promised to let you in on the creative process behind the first song (which for any who missed it is in the post right before this one), so I'll tell you how it grew from nothing into something.

As I hinted at before, it started by coming up with the basic premise of the lyrics, an Old West marshal. At that point, it was pretty clear to me that it was going to have some sort of country/bluegrass/rockabilly feel.

I began with the drums. I left them relatively sparse in the verses/solos, leaving plenty of room for the guitar work and vocals to be the focus. To add a bit of flavor, I threw hand claps in the solo sections. At least my drum machine called them hand claps. I tried doing the claps myself at one point and it actually sounded worse; maybe a different microphone would've helped. I knew I wanted a thunderous sounding chorus, and the toms and crashes seemed to achieve that.

Once I had basic drums down, the acoustic guitar was next. I went for a fast-paced, aggressive rhythm, like something you might hear in Mumford & Sons or Spirit of the West. The clean electric guitar parts followed, providing a punchy but slightly haunting theme to the verses. The acoustic and clean guitar in the chorus was almost non-existent, as I knew the gritty, distorted guitar was going to be the focus. I added a rough clean guitar solo in the first set of versus just to establish the feel of it.

At this point, I switched over to bass and finished up the verses. I wanted the bassline to provide a sense of motion, and the passages I came up with had a galloping feel much like the toms in the chorus. I may have had Ennio Morricone's theme from The Good, The Bad & The Ugly somewhere in the back of my mind.

The distorted guitar parts of the chorus were then recorded, along with a distorted version of the verse melody for the second half of the song, and a rough solo.

After that came the vocals. My first attempt at writing the lyrics actually had about twice the words. When I attempted to sing them, I found I had a hard time cramming all the words in and realized that many of the lines were adding needless detail that actually made it boring. I cut out half the lyrics, leaving only what I felt was essential to tell the story; this approach made more sense and I had an easier time giving a melody and rhythm to the words.

Everything after that was going back and touching things up; everything I just described was the way the song went from nothing to a full, rough cut. It'll be interesting to see how the next song compares to this one as it comes together.