The Light of Day

What Do You Think Of Yourself? (demo, 4/6/99 8:11 PM)
KeithHandy posted in Composing, Instruments, Old skool, Playing, Producing, Songwriting on June 9th, 2007

Here is something straddling the line between demo and song-skeleton: What Do You Think Of Yourself. Thanks to Garrett’s verbal time-stamping, we can now pinpoint the exact year, day, and minute that the acoustic demo was originally recorded. The funny thing is, I forgot we ever did record the song, and it was a delightful surprise to find it intact when I was inventory-ing my reels a few years later. The drums (for part of the song) had already been played by myself in a separate session, and I had to do some time-squashing of our demo to fit it to the tempo of the drums.

Apologies for my out-of-tune vocal, and for, uh… Michael Bolton. That will be cut at the last minute, but I’m keeping it in the working version because it’s a cheap laugh. :)

Oh, I almost forgot the reason why I’m posting this now: I just used Da Hornet (plus a Leslie effect) to make the “spinning” chord for the intro (0:58 - 1:39).

Whenever all the noise dies
Behind the lids of my eyes
It’s never hard to give rise to a “me thing”
But when I see the whole earth
I wonder how much I’m worth
Or if I even deserve to be breathing

People pay a pretty penny
Collecting clowns to criticize
People love to make a fool of
That reflection in Bozo’s eyes

Have you noticed when you’re looking
At squirmy worms that crawl the ground
Squirmy worms are less repulsive
They look up while you look down

What do you think of yourself?

Every day you let slip away from you
Is a day you can never retrieve
Twenty four hours of your past down the drain
Your future might as well just get up and leave
And when you choke your deepest desires
Your worst fears are guaranteed to come true
‘Cause really, isn’t your worst fear of all
That nothing good will ever happen to you?

Are you good or are you evil
After all is said and done?
Is your life worth watching over?
And I mean that in more ways than one

What do you think of yourself?

Edit 6/11/07: “What’s all that with just the drums by themselves from 5:49 onward?”, I hear you asking. That’s for a section of music that bridges What Do You Think into the next song. Fortunately for me, as I sit behind a drumset, I can hear all of my chord changes in my head. Unfortunately for you, you can’t hear all my chord changes in your head, so all you hear is drums.

New piano part to the rescue!

I put in way too many hours — yes, that’s right, you heard me, “hours” — on this new piano overdub over this past weekend. First, I played the grandiose dramatic thing from 1:18 - 1:52, as in actually played it on the keyboard, since I’ve played it thousands of times and pretty much knew exactly note for note what I wanted there. Since you can only play so well on a $100 unweighted keyboard, I did take some time cleaning that up in piano roll view: erasing mis-hit notes, quantizing rhythm, smoothing out volume (”velocity”) of notes.

Then I did the quiet part from 0:50 - 1:17, the same way, but separate from the quiet “guide drums” so they wouldn’t be locked into that tempo. Since it was a little shorter/faster than the guide drums, I lined it up with the next part, and then slid all that stuff to the left to line it up with the part before it.

For the “apocalyptic chords” (0:22 - 0:49), I knew what chords I wanted there but didn’t have a set way in my mind to play them, so I “composed” that whole part by drawing it in the piano roll view, working backwards from the end of the section so that it would lead into the next part as naturally as possible. (Kind of bends the definition of the word “naturally”, I realize.)

For everything before that, the “jam-out” part (which you only hear the tail end of here), I did a combination of actual playing and creative note-drawing, got too far out with it — to the point where it was getting in the way — and then replaced the most excessive bits with simple filler. One of the big differences between the me of today and the me of 1992-1994 is that I realize I have this tendency to overwrite, and know when to cut out a crazy measure and replace it with dead-simple quarter notes and triads.

Towards the end, when I only had a few measures left to fill in (0:04-0:18 on this mp3), I felt creatively zapped. I was ready to call it a night and go to bed, when I asked myself this awesomely powerful question: “what would you put in there if you had to quickly put something there and didn’t have time to think about it?” That helped blast that block out of the way, for sure. And I didn’t cop out on those measures — I did wind up putting some real “artistry” into them — but that was kickstarted by the “just do something” mindset.

“So what’s up with the piano all by itself from 1:53 to the end?”

Ah, another day… another day…