Rock School

So we’re running this contest over at the Positron! site, wherein we asked for remixes of a song off my upcoming Micronaut album, and the winner is voted on to the disc. I wasn’t expecting to be swamped with remixes. I expected to get five, or maybe ten at the most. Come midnight today, I had 25! It kind of made the process a little more difficult, especially for the people that are taking the voting seriously. They have to choose among 25 possibilities, and pick one to go on the album.

Generally, when I’m making a Sister Machine Gun album, I start about 30 to 40 songs, and finish around 15 of them, depending on the mood striking me, or my desire to finish any particular idea. When I’m doing a Micronaut album, that number is more like 75 to 100 tracks. (I should mention that the starting point I’m happy with is only about 16 bars long, so it’s not like I’m actually recording a hundred tracks, then throwing 85% of them away. They’re just ideas, really.) I’ll generally bring about 25 of these to a stage that could be called “almost done.” Then, I’ll pick the best 15, and grind them together, changing keys and tempos, until I have a completed record.

With this, my fourth Micronaut album, I went about things a little differently. I had the usual hundred or so ideas, and had actually completed eight songs, with the (quite misguided, it turns out) idea that I was half-way done with the record. Then I had to run across one of those albums that Changes Everything. It’s kind of annoying when that happens, truth be told. The first Underworld album (not the “Underneath the Radar” Underworld, although I liked that iteration quite a bit, when it was pertinent, but the “dubnobasswithmyheadman” album) was one of those records. David Bowie’s Earthling was another one. Whenever I happen across one of these records, it changes the way I listen to (and thus make) music. This can be quite a pain in the ass. It really was in the old days, when I wrote in a proper studio. My fourth Sister Machine Gun record ended up costing over a quarter million dollars to make because of a situation like this. I went in to the studio one night, pulled out all the 2” tapes, and erased everything but the SMPTE on all of them, thus flushing 3 months of writing and recording down the tubes. You gotta do what you gotta do.

Anyways, blah, blah, blah, life-changing, etc. etc. Same thing here. I was half-way done with the album, and all the sudden I got turned on to Harry Gregson-Williams’ score for Man On Fire. Don’t know why this record hit me so hard. Up until this point, I’ve actually studiously avoided most movie scores. But for some reason, this album did _it_ for me, whatever that is. I suddenly decided that all the songs I’d done for Europa totally fucking blew, and I could do much better. So, I started over. Took me another three months to write the album again, but I’ve now done so, and the finish line is here.

The point of all this? The song that was the fodder for the remix is one of the first pre-Gregson-Williams bunch, so now I have to figure out how to make a song that sounds almost nothing like the rest of the album, and its attendant remix, fit in with the other 15-odd tracks. Should be an interesting exercise.