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

Awakening, per Google

The demo version of awakening can be streamed in entirety from Last.fm

Once, long ago, I saw the sun inside the fire
But now my eyes are burned and blind
The time has come to walk the road into tomorrow
And put the memories behind

My body tires and I must sleep for the night
I wonder where the time has gone?
I stare into the fire; my childhood burns before me
And turns to ash before the dawn

I ask the stars one question: Will my memory live on?
The sun has almost risen; my dream has just begun

Again the night comes and I hear the voices screaming
I cannot sleep until I’m there
My journey seems to be a neverending nightmare
Bound by these chains I must wear

In the distance is the ocean
The night is almost gone
The tears are all behind me
My dream is almost done

There was a time when all I thought of was tomorrow
But now I see my time has come
The river’s edge calls me back onto it’s shoreline
I wonder where the time has gone

[Demo}+:

• So… close… There’s so much right about this that, of all the tracks, I hate having to redo this one the most.  This was my first experience in a professional studio environment, and I have nothing but fond memories of the experience (even the long stretches of tedium that invariably come with the tracking process).  Of everything we ever worked on together, this is probably one of the best collaborative efforts of Daniel and I together.
• The first (acoustic) instrumental break remains one of the best things I’ve ever managed to get on tape.  Everything about it just clicks for me — even the bad notes.  It’s a perfect soundscape, with the looped cricket and playground noises, the lack of percussion, the bass keeping time but wandering, the guitar… It was meant to represent a memory dream, and it works perfectly to my ear.
• I’m not big on the melody, but I really like Daniel’s delivery.  Not that it couldn’t be better, all these years later, but it works.
• The mix and interplay between piano and guitar, especially, is really good. As is the overall mix.

{Demo}-:

• As usual, the drums — although these were actually played by a human.  First time around, Daniel played them on some sort of trigger/pad “kit”, and then that was quantized, and far from perfectly.  The second time around, if memory serves correctly — and I can’t swear that it does — Alan Bates played live drums.  For some reason,  I don’t have a copy of that session (I imagine it was lost to the great car theft of 1994, when a box filled with CDs and DATs of demos and other stuff was lost forever).  I really wish I still had the copy of the second session, as Alan was later murdered by his ex-wife.  I have three other songs that he played drums on, and I regret that the songs themselves weren’t worth anything.
• The electric rhythm tone — and the lead tone, too — are terrible.  Thanks, Kenn’s obsession with hair metal.

{Backstory}:

There maybe older songs from my head (and I’m sure that they need to stay lost to memory’s closets), but this is the first thing I ever wrote that later got recorded. The lyrics were written when I was 17, just after I found out that my grandmother was following in my late grandfather’s Alzheimer’s-laden footsteps.  It was probably the greatest feeling of loss that I felt for her — far more so than her death ten years later — because I remembered what the disease had done to my grandfather, and the foresight of what was coming was (to my imagination) as bad as it could have gotten.

The song is about moving past fear and sadness, and into acceptance.  I hope that my grandmother was able to dream her old dreams one last time before she awoke.

{Demo notes}:

Recorded at Sound of Birmingham studios in 1992 or 1993 on 24-track 2-inch analog (!) by Noah White.  Daniel played the piano, the keyboards and the drums, and I took the guitars and bass (including the sound of a bracelet which the acoustic mic refused to ignore).  Daniel’s vocals, also.

{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.

• Can you spot the Pink Floyd influence?  It’s a cross between two things that I was listening to in constant rotation, thanks to Daniel: Roger Water’s AMUSED TO DEATH and Pink Floyd’s MOMENTARY LAPSE OF REASON.  The acoustic interlude was particularly inspired by Jeff Beck’s lead playing on The Ballad of Bill Hubbard. For an overall feel, though it came later, Pink Floyd’s High Hopes is a perfect example of the big picture — cinematic, building, soaring.
• See also Porcupine Tree’s Lazarus.  All these songs seem to me like very sad moments viewed from a perspective of hope (or acceptance, at the very least).  It’s the idea that saying goodbye is okay.
• I really, really, really, wish I could play guitar well enough to make it sing, to accurately convey an emotion that I have trouble putting into words.  The perfect example — one I wish I could lift and import into Awakening — is the solo from Lotus Feet by Steve Vai.  There’s something so intense to me in this solo — the first time I ever heard it (and many times thereafter) I was moved literally to tears by what I heard.  It’s an adrenaline rush at the climax of the movie, orgasmic release, realization of a lifetime of prayer.  You literally can’t follow it with anything except for an end… and yet time keeps moving forward.  Start at 4:00, and the real explosion comes at 4:50.  (I also find it best to just listen — Steve’s one of the most intense musicians I’ve ever met, and I have nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for him, but I find it terribly distracting to watch his facial expressions)
• In a similar vein — and something I’ve considered working in, since I don’t know any Steve Vais well enough to ask them to play on my stuff — is the “break” in Devin Townsend’s Fluke. Starting at around 2:50 and moving through two sections, Devin does the same soaring/uplifting/breaking-through-the-heavens thing with his vocal layers that Steve does with his guitar.  This, coincidentally, is one of the coolest things that Devin does (see also a few tracks off of OCEAN MACHINE).