(for more information on the upcoming audio project, click on the QUICKSAND category, to the right)

The demo version of another night wasted can be streamed in entirety from Last.fm

8:16 PM:
Sun falls into madness, bare the edges/feel the cold of this raw wound
Speed ahead: the last call – not a bottle left, the emptiness consumed

It’s all in how you look at things

There’s no one left to listen but these voices in my head…

I believed the promise of the rain; I believed everything she said nothing

11:04 PM:
Crawling in the warmth, I’m not forbidden, I can’t make this disappear
Feel my way through crowded memories – these shadows can’t hide all my fears

It only hurts a little – then it’s gone

There’s no one left to listen to the voice inside my head…

I believed the promise of the rain; I believed everything she said nothing

2:05 AM:
I fall — stumble once again.
Hold these breathing walls, watch a thousand hours spin

The sound of our lives stands for everything I can remember

There’s no one left to listen to the voices in my head…

I believed the promise of the rain; I believed everything you said nothing.

[Demo}+:

• arrangement, though could be shortened (see -)
• Jonas’ vocal intensity; this one should be acted and felt, more than just sung
• music box layered with piano in choruses
• Melissa’s vocals, both the “remembered” spoken word sections and the harmonies.  The timbre of her voice was a perfect match with this song, soothing and whispered, motherly, the idealized “everything will be all right” tone.
• The reverb-soaked random guitar noises.  I think there should be more of these as the song progresses, and more discordant, too, though subtly.

{Demo}-:

• The solo guitars don’t fit for me at all.  I can’t tell if they’re too over-the-top, if it’s a tonal thing, or if they just don’t belong.  The idea of possibly replacing them with a cello melody occurs, or perhaps something Leaving Hope-esque.
• The piano “walking” through the stereo field is nice — it too should increase in how pronounced it is as the song progresses — but it’s too pronounced as it is; it becomes a major distraction.

{Backstory}:

Like so many of the songs meant for Quicksand, this one stems from my first divorce.  It’s built around wordplay — I had written one drunken night:

I believed
everything
she said
nothing

I believed everything
she said nothing

I believed everything she said
Nothing

… and so forth and so on, until the front and back of an entire, unfolded bar napkin was covered with every permutation of these six words in this order.  It fascinated me to see how emphasis and punctuation could change the meaning so completely.

The song itself is about killing time and brain cells and liver function, that hopeless belief that, if time heals all wounds, you can fast forward to the painless part.  I’ve found that to be a fool’s dream, but I sure lived it for a while.  The title continues the play on word emphasis and dual meaning.

{Demo notes}:

Vocals by Jonas Grey and Melissa Bush; piano and music box by Daniel Farris; everything else (all the stuff I don’t like now, as it happens) by me.  All music and lyrics by me; I feel certain that these lyrics were tweaked a bit by Jonas in performance, and I know that Daniel helped with arranging.  Melissa deserves special credit, too, for suggesting a lot of what we did with her vocals, and the placement of when and where she appeared.  I think, especially a decade later, that she made a lot of the song that much stronger with her ideas.

{Fixes/Influences}:

Note: these link to YouTube videos, most of which are probably unauthorized.  If one of them is down, try searching for the song.  And as always, if you dig the songs, I highly recommend dropping a few bucks on the full discs — these artists are well-worth your financial support.

Feel free to leave comments or suggestions in the comments.

• Saline (Frost*); the song is very similar in feel and arrangement.  It feels thicker, closer in production to what I want for ANW.  It builds beautifully, too, and then collapses, dynamically, toward the end.  Beautiful use of space.
• Leaving Hope (Nine Inch Nails): This one keeps popping back up in my refining of these songs; the ambiance of the song is what’s so important to me, over and over.  Reznor is a master at building strong backgrounds that are obviously there, but don’t intrude on what’s going on in the foreground (it’s entirely possible, too, that I keep coming back to this subconsciously; I just realized that LH was used in the soundtrack for Silent Hill 2.