Semaphore

Yesterday wasn't too terribly eventful and went more or less as planned.  I watched more tennis than usual, basically because the US Open is winding down and I thought the matches would be really amazing.  Well, I was kind of wrong about that, and apparently the Olympics have been playing havoc on many of the players, making way too many of the matches rather bizarre in nature.  This US Open won't exactly go down in history as amazing.

"Semaphore on All Fours" is one of my personal favorite tracks on the Defrost Nixon album so it's pretty important to me to make it come to life in a great manner.  I'm particularly proud of this track since it was a bit of an experiment, an arty one at that.  I wrote the main song originally but then had this wild idea of adding a French spoken word part at the end of it, more or less combing two songs almost although they flow really wonderfully into one another.  The end result is nearly a 10 minute song.  The question at the time was how in the hell do you do the French speaking part?!  I knew no one that was fluent in French, mind you.  Somehow, through asking a variety of people, I found someone and it went really well overall except that the vocal itself is probably the most sibilant thing I've personally ever recorded, and that's because Ellen (the speaker) was doing her best to enunciate every single syllable.  Me, like a dummy, didn't stop her...or wasn't really thinking at the time how this would wreak havoc on the recording, so it's really my fault, not hers.  I've been fighting with this particular spoken word part pretty much ever since, trying to make it workable.

This track was always one of the best ones that we played in practice but strangely we never played it out.  Kind of a bummer.  In any event, I always have a lot of pride in anything rather arty leaning in my work and so this one really stands out for me.

I didn't actually get to finish what I was working on but then again I haven't really finished any of these songs all week.  If nothing else, though, it's setup and ready to be heavily tinkered with.