Day Eighteen: Wednesday 15 June 2005
James wants to have another go at ‘Cease And Desist’. Overnight he has come up with an idea for a ‘sound’ for the intro. This involves using an MXR Phase 90 pedal with a Gibson Les Paul. It sounds really good and now we have the dilemma of two really good introductions for the song. Most of the day is spent going over the guitars on ‘Cease And Desist’ using combinations of 12 string 335 and six string Gibson Les Paul. Generally, while one of us is working on the recordings and fine tuning the specifics of the tracking, I have been going out into the garden with a guitar and my tape recorder. I have to point out that the weather has been fantastic. I like to sit on the bench in the Garden and trawl through my tapes looking for song ideas and then working them out on a guitar. I have a little Sony cassette recorder which I carry around with me and use it to record snippets of song / ideas as and when they come to me, sometimes at home, or out on the road in the dressing room before shows. The nature of these recordings vary from some being quite good to others being sometimes inaudible. One of the songs I find was written during the Dead Men Walking tour last year. It is a very simple tune based on a guitar figure that I had come up with and a four chord chorus. Craig and Steve have both heard me messing around with it and want to have a crack at it. This is what is exciting about this recording session for me, it is all very fluid and unpredictable. I did not arrive at this session with a fixed idea of song and structure. We are trying to make it up as we go along, making the connections between the music and the direction it is taking us as and when it happens. It is very demanding for me, which I like. I have written a lot of songs but I am looking for the right ones that will suit our collective mind set. Craig comes out to join me in the garden and we begin the process of learning the chords, at this point I come up with an introductory chord sequence which also works at the end of each chorus. Craig has worked up a great riff on his guitar and we spend quite sometime seeing if we can include it as an extended coda / finale to the song. We decide to give this song a run through in the morning as Steve is due back tonight and we can carry on tracking from tomorrow. We decide not to do any more work this evening instead, we are all going for a pint or two.
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