Rabbits Full of Magic

First off I was very ill when I was born. I was born with a hole in my heart and shortly afterwards contracted spinal meningitis. My repair job was performed at the Emory-Egleston Children's Heart Center and I believe I am the most successful result of a procedure that was quite experimental back in 1981. Which means I am still alive. It wasn't easy getting that way though, lots of medicine had to be taken, lots of hospitals had to be visited. I had night terrors and out of body experiences often when I was very young. Later when I was a teenager I was put on medicine that was vital to easing the stress on my tender heart, but it meant slowing down my body's growth, which ended up affecting me on physical, hormonal, and mental levels. As a result of all of this I have always felt out of place, even among misfits and friends. I also have a tough time opening up in relationships, which explains why I am the last of my siblings or bandmates to be married. Anyways here is this song, which is sort of about that experience, and about other people encountering me, this weird being. Trying to get close to the alien that is incapable of being close to anyone because he is kind of frozen in time.

If God could give me a do-over who knows I may take it I may not. Actually I wouldn't, unless I got to be a manta ray or something non-human. Plus I love my parents too much and they are wonderful, cool magicians for saving my life and I will never forget that. They also taught me all about art and music, and they are secretly the coolest people ever.

The recording itself couldn't have gone better imo. This is the best-sounding recording I have EVER done. First I recorded the drums by pulling them into my bedroom and setting them up so that I could play while sitting on the bed. I cut and looped these and laid out a skeleton on Ableton. I zoomed in and cut out the snare hits and added compression and reverb and stuff to make them pop extra crunchy. Then I added a guitar hit on the 2 and 4. It's something I've been thinking a lot about, those old arrangements, like the Motown stuff from the 60s. The guitarists didn't strum the entire time on those songs. They might have just hit a chord once each measure, to beef up the rhythmic element in the song. Anyways when I had that in, I added some reverb and preverb in order to get it sounding of like a synth (actually, to me, it sounds like an ambulance). Then I added another guitar, one that I would play with the volume knob, so that it fades it around and behind the main hits. I wanted some bass so I plugged in a MIDI keyboard and used something from a set of Mellotron samples I have. To finish off the instrumental arrangement, I added some vibraphones at a critical part in the chorus. The vocals came next, and I'm getting tired of writing, so let's just say I pushed the record button and sang into the microphone. It's a Yeti Blue Pro USB microphone, and it does have some problems with digital artifacts, but it sounds fucking BRILLIANT.

posted by Adam  # 10:38:00 AM 1 Comments