Scott Andrew - lo-fi acoustic pop superhero!

I’m doing a little musical spring cleaning in the hope that I’ll eventually finish a full-length record of new songs sometime in the next few months. It’s a lot more work than I thought. For one thing, I’m re-recording all the vocals on existing songs. It take a certain amount of emotional detachment on my part to just toss out the vocal tracks from songs like Gravel Road Requiem and Cast The Net Wide, as if they were coffee grounds or something.

I have to, though. The instrument tracks can be tweaked, but nothing masks the sound of plosives (that’s the popping sound you hear when you voice a hard consonant against the mic, like the letter p or b) or sibilance (the hi-frequency hissing sound of air escaping over the teeth, like “sh” or “ch.” Aren’t breath-stream dynamics interesting? Yeah, thought so.) I can usually let those imperfections slip for a 56Kbps MP3 file, but I can hear them — always — and it drives me batty.

Another thing I’m grappling with is putting together a list of at least ten solid songs that are varied enough to keep people from falling into a stupor. Unfortunately, there’s something about composing on an acoustic guitar that leads to a surfeit of depressing ballads. So a lot of perfectly good tunes are being kicked to the curb to make room for more uptempo numbers.

Case in point: this new version of Stay The Same (beware: 4MB download), completely re-recorded. Compare with the original demo from 2000. This was going to be on the record until I realized it’d just be filler. It’s old (written in 1997), slow and never did blow my socks off. But it’s still a decent song; the mix came out really clean and I’m very proud of my oh-so-clever backwards guitar solo. Y’know, back in Olden Tymes, we actually had to run the tape backward to get that effect! Now you just select the waveform with the mouse, right-click and choose “Reverse.”

So I’m setting it free here, in hopes that I’ll be forced to fill the gap with something more rockin’.