The Living Rockumentary

I started a new project last night. For the past few months I have been, on-and-off, transferring my old tattered home-recording cassettes onto the computer. It's more a form of archival preservation than anything. In doing so, though, I have come across a number of songs that I think would be worth resurrecting in one way or another. Maybe for the band to play or maybe for a solo effort or maybe just to do for myself.

Last night I started to recreate an old song called "Stupid, Starry Night." I listened to the original recording carefully and re-programmed the drum machine to be almost identical to that original and then recorded that. It was pretty fun. Whenever I do use a drum machine these days, it is still the same one that I used way back on all my old 4-track recordings, so all the sounds are exactly the same (Alesis HR-16). It was a nice escapist hour or so of pure concentration on this one thing.

I added a bass track, too. Which meant learning note-for-note my original, which was also interesting since it was arranged very differently than I would have done it these days. I was learning a thing or two from the past me about simplicity. I was dying to jump into recording the guitars but at this point it was about 1:30 AM and I didn't think the neighbors would appreciate it - even though I could hear them clearly making a bunch of talking and stomping noises of their own. Hopefully, today, when I get home from work, I will have the same energy and drive to do the guitars and vocals.

Why am I bothering? Why not just keep the original? Well, there are a few reasons. One is that the song is better than the recording and performance of it. There are a lot of great things about cassette 4-tracks but their limitations are also pretty hefty. The sound is so tiny and thin and, now, through years of sitting in cars and playing and rewinding and fast-forwarding and gathering dust and getting cold and getting hot, the tapes themselves have been damaged. They are warbly and muddled, lots of them were tapes of tapes of tapes to begin with.

Performance-wise there are limitations on the old stuff, too. For one thing, I didn' t sing as well back then as I do now, and those of you who know how well I sing now can only imagine what that really means for the old tapes. Not only did I not sing as well, I usually only gave it one shot per song. In those days, I had a procedure: Write a song and immediately record it, pretty much making up the arrangement as I went along, and that was it. Song done, move on to next one.

It was a good way to capture moments of time and to record the inspiration, unfortunately, it was also a good way to capture poor performances and recording qualities. I'm trying to look at these recordings as demos that I made in order to, some day, present to the me of the now, the future of the old me. There are songs from then that don't sound the way I intended and I know in my heart what I really wanted them to sound like. Now, since I have better resources, I'm trying to make them more the way they originally wanted to be.

Of course, 10 years from now, I'll have way better equipment again and I will be more skilled at singing and playing, so I may want to do them again. I don't know if there's anything wrong with that or not. I don't want to be doing some Sting remixes of old Police songs or anything. Right now, I am pretty sure that I still know deep down the original intent of the songs and I can execute them to be closer to that than they currently are.

So, yeah, that's what I was doing last night instead of a bunch of the other stuff that I was supposed to be doing, like updating the Rub Wrongways page or thinking of artwork or booking shows etc etc etc.