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"I write songs about high ideas and aspirations and I admire Martin Luther King and John Hume, peaceful people, but in myself I'm capable of aggression of a really brutal kind." -- Bono, 2000 |
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"I write songs about high ideas and aspirations and I admire Martin Luther King and John Hume, peaceful people, but in myself I'm capable of aggression of a really brutal kind." -- Bono, 2000 |
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My Fan Year - #41
@U2,
November 05, 2005
Once, long ago, I took classes in digital production; I learned just enough about audio manipulation with programs like ProTools to be dangerous. I spent many happy hours making "remixes" by looping bits of songs, rearranging verses, playing vocals backward -- maybe I never made The Grey Album, but that's all right. It was neat to find songs suited to being messed with. Radiohead's "Everything In Its Right Place" was like a set of Legos -- its short pattern of notes, constantly repeated, lets you stack Thom Yorke singing "there are two colors in my head" over Thom Yorke singing "yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon" until you get quite a nifty tower of Thom Yorkes. R.E.M.'s "Saturn Return" can turn into an echo chamber, with as many as three Michael Stipes muttering "harder to look yourself square in the eye" to each other at song's end. And the set of dance remixes on the "Mysterious Ways" single -- I made a Frankenstein's monster mega-mix out of those babies, taking bits I liked from one and grafting them onto another. A good time was had by me. Better results came out of a cut and paste I called "Always a Beautiful Day." The main song is "Beautiful Day" but its predecessor shows up in the chorus; Bono sings "It's a beautiful day!" out the right channel and "What we have we're gonna keep!" out the left. Now I can't think of one song without singing the other. I wait patiently for the day when I get pulled on stage like one of those cool chicks in EXIT so I can yell "Get down off your holy cloud/God will not deal with the proud!" over Edge's high harmonies. Somehow -- and I don't know how; I know nothing about keys and chords, so how did I first guess it might work? -- I decided to stick two songs together that weren't so directly related. The result? "All I Want Is the First Time." Put your ear up to the screen and I'll sing it for you: You say (I have a lover) you want Same key, same chord changes, five years and one Achtung Baby in between'em. The classic sounds never go out of style. All that was just to set the stage. Really what I came here to talk about was this... I've been thinking of another song lately as being a nephew or grandchild of "The First Time" -- not so much musically but lyrically: "All Because of You." The first verse of "The First Time" talks about a lover who "teach me how to sing"; the first verse of "All Because of You" addresses someone who "heard me in my tune." Could the bullet train the tor-toyse is racing with be the same brother who "spends his running after me" in the second verses? And the decade after the narrator of the first song leaves by the back door and throws away the key, there's a scream at the door of "the place I started out from and I want back inside!"
© @U2/Pancella, 2005.
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