I am almost done with my album.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I can forgive you if you\u2019re pretty sure you\u2019ve heard this before. After all, I\u2019ve been almost done with my album for about a year now. But I have an excuse: I had one song that was killing me. It\u2019s called \u201cBliss\u201d, and it\u2019s about my dear bride, She Who Must Be Taunted. It\u2019s suppose to be an album highlight, a Turtles-ish earworm worthy of my immoderate delight with my wife. And we recorded it, me and Dave, and it just sat there, like a lump, more earthworm than earworm, and I was frankly stumped. I didn\u2019t know how to fix it, and the album was not going to be done until I did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
The first thing I had to do (sorry, Dave) was replace the original drum part, and when that didn\u2019t fix it (sorry, Josh), the original bass part, too. And when that<\/em> didn\u2019t fix it, well, I had to (gulp) ask other people for help.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You\u2019d think, given my lack of professional musical training, that I\u2019d do this more often. After all, I\u2019m quite aware that, as an arranger, I have the sophistication of a three-year-old\u2019s coloring book. But I like to do these things myself. I mean, I usually<\/em> get there, after several months of carping at Dave and swearing at my various keyboards, and I relish the sense of personal accomplishment, in the same way that a toddler points with pride at the toilet after a bowel movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, back to those pesky other people. There were a lot of them. One of my best friends told me to listen to the Beatles\u2019 \u201cYour Mother Should Know\u201d; the producer of my last album sang a sample vocal line behind a crucial portion of the chorus; and, after I\u2019d added a whole barbershop quartet part based on it, SWMBT told me that it should be doo-wop instead. I still had to write a keyboard part (and I definitely tried several), but the backing vocals made all the difference when my producer and I recorded them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I had to do a lot to make this song work. Every little change – a new bass part, the backing vocals, the painful iteration of keyboard parts – helped, and every one of them was necessary. I tried things I\u2019d never tried before, like using my Yamaha digital piano as a MIDI controller. But the thing that made the difference was the people who helped me out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s funny, when your name goes on an album. Sure, the contributors get their credits, but it really isn\u2019t enough. It\u2019s not just that Dave played drums on the album, and my brother played bass, and Adam Rothberg played lead guitar, and Jake Bush played accordion, and producer Doug Kwartler played a little bit of whatever I needed him to; these people wrote the damn parts. I may have nudged (OK, bitched and moaned) them in my preferred directions, but I can\u2019t write a bass or drum or lead guitar part. I may have caused the album to come into being, written the songs, sung the vocals, played the rhythm guitar, but it\u2019s not nearly as much my creation as it might appear. And after all this time, and all these albums, you\u2019d think that I\u2019d keep that in mind, but no, I\u2019m still the kid standing next to the toilet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am almost done with my album. I can forgive you if you\u2019re pretty sure you\u2019ve heard this before. After all, I\u2019ve been almost done with my album for about a year now. But I have an excuse: I had one song that was killing me. It\u2019s called \u201cBliss\u201d, and it\u2019s about my dear bride, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-low-notes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=838"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":839,"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838\/revisions\/839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}