Rough Track #7: Ornithopters
A few days after The Distorted Historian was released, Jim and I started shaping some of Jim’s riffs and progressions into a fast-slow-fast song. It was 8 or 9 minutes long but it seemed right. So once that structure was finalized I spent a while writing lyrics and a melody and recorded this:
ornithoptersROUGH1.mp3
There might have been something that came before this, but let’s just say this is the very first version, and it’s dated May 7th, 2008.
Then five weeks later after some additions, but still no drums, we had this:
ornithoptersROUGH3.mp3
Which is pretty much the same thing, but denser—not necessarily bigger. I wanted it to be bigger, but couldn’t find the right sound and the proper way to accomplish it. So instead, we added even more things, made it more dense, and came up with this:
ornithoptersROUGH8.mp3
And we sat on that for a few months until we got together to play some live shows and that helped a bit in discovering the weak spots.
Jim said:
This song used to be my favorite and right now it is my least favorite. So, I propose we redo this song much faster, maybe even a little faster than the live version we did.
So that’s what we did. We murdered a year and a half of recordings and mixes and started over completely, and it turned out much better: pretty close to the album version.
On a whim, I changed some lyrics around and added more. It is perhaps a superbly lame thing to say, but the breakdown/intro-to-the-coda portion involving the girl with a scar and a car and a dress and such was stuck in my head, exactly as it is now written and recorded, right after coming out of a dream. Luck. That’s all. Or: I could be remembering something subconsciously and just stealing it. If I am doing that, let me know.
