I thought of a couple more stories about the "Lost Weekend" recording process to more or less go along with my previous post. The song "Ruin" was an interesting one, and I think it was the third song that I recorded, right after "Across the Desert" and "Interstate Blind", and there are a few stories there to tell.
The idea for the song was very old, something I more or less dreamt up years earlier while lying in bed. I have always been a fan of the volume pedal swell thing on guitars, the best examples probably being from the "Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" album by Genesis and the classic ending to "The Gates of Delirium" by Yes from the "Relayer" album, still a personal favorite of mine to this very day. I came up with the volume pedal swell melody only in my head and somehow lodged it away in my memory. Upon deciding to finally commit to working on the "Lost Weekend" album, I somehow remembered that idea and decided to finally give it a shot.
"Ruin" is one of the few tracks on this remix which got a heavier polishing. I've always been unhappy with my horrid piano playing, and if I'm correct, I believe I played it without a click track, a terrible decision looking back on it. I knew before even thinking about doing a remix of this album that I'd be replacing that with a newly updated version via MIDI and worked on that about 1-2 years ago, painstakingly having to move all the other recorded bits around, shortening them slightly and so on, in order to make it fit a consistent tempo and click track. It was a ton of work but the end result is that you can't even tell that I did any of that...which means success, of course.
"Ruin" actually started with a very different ending that I still have a blueprint of on the recorded song, only muted so it's not heard. It actually ended with a very heavy drum track and a haunting, doom sounding keyboard layover, and we experimented with doing different voices where someone would say "...you're ruined..." I played with it a bit and simply didn't like it, feeling it was a bit on the silly side, and so I scrapped it, completely went in a different direction, and instead picked up my nylon string guitar, pressed record, and played a very simply outro piece which is what I ended up using. The fadeout of that guitar bit ended up bookending very nicely with the short and fade in/out of the title track "Lost Weekend".
Of course, the real standout on "Ruin" is the child's voice intro of "...Daddy, why have you forsaken us?" I had an idea of doing this short spoken word bit and my friend Terry (Terry #1, if you're keeping track) had a stepdaughter who seemed really outgoing. He came over one day with her and her slightly older brother who was incredibly quiet, and after multiple attempts at trying to get the stepdaughter to do the bit, we realized it just wasn't working since the microphone was apparently making her really nervous. At a loss, we then realized we had another child present in the room and sheepishly asked if he would be interested in giving it a shot, and much to our surprise he knocked it out in about 2 minutes with the perfect sad, melancholy tone that it required. We were both quite ecstatic with the outcome and could hardly believe our luck.
The very last song that I wrote and recorded for the album was "After the Rain", a title that I believe I arrived at via a film that I watched at the time but then changed the words around slightly (and hence I can't figure out now what movie it actually was). It's based on a very simple bossa nova beat on the drum machine, something I had never worked with before, and I believe I loosely got the idea for it from some instrumental album that I was listening to at the time, possibly something by Acoustic Alchemy. It ended up being one of my favorite tunes and I think I recorded it a bit better than the rest of the album since I think I had a bit more confidence by that point. I've always seen that song as one of the "singles" from "Lost Weekend", if you could imagine such a thing.
You may notice that film influences my musical endeavors quite a bit and that is no understatement. Being a lover of cinema definitely has its advantages and no shortage of inspiration.
That's all for now. If I think of anything else, I'll post it here as well.
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