Today we had our first taste of violin. It was sweet, and to make the violin taste sweet you really need some skills. I tried it once, that little fretboard, fretless, curved, played with a bow that you have to learn how to hold and keep it level, the instrument held under the chin, light, fragile, I made it sound like a strangled cat in a steel shredding factory, luckily I have Olivia.

Multi-tracking the violin is an interesting task as you try to find the notes that help you create a string section (without actually having a string section), different notes, harmonies, and octaves on different tracks, it sounds wonderful when you get it right. We started the day with that before moving on to vocals on one of the last backing tracks that we have been working on. It’s a strange one, I’ve sung the whole song on a low octave and today I’m going to sing the whole song an octave higher. Then we see what we have and decide whether the sections should have alternate (for example) high and low vocals or whether they should be sung in unison. That’s making records, figuring these things out.

On the subject of making records, I had another strange dream last night which when I woke up I immediately remembered. There was a venue, old black rooms, a disco starting, a lot of teenagers dancing but the house lights were still on as if it was just getting going and soon the lights would be going off…but not yet for some reason? At some point, I walked out of the room and when I walked back in, the doors leading to the disco had changed and when you went through them they led you into a different room than before.

This is where the mysteries of dreams come to the fore. In the studio today I’d told DC who was recording my vocals about a song I had written with Chris Bailey, Passing Strange on the Nothing Is Straight In My House album that I made with The Saints in The Netherlands in 2005. I’d told him about this from the vocal booth and in my dream, Chris was on the other side of a window, like a vocal booth, but not really (haha, that’s dreams). Oddly I was doing the recording (I’m not an engineer). Even worse I was recording him on some TV remote control type device, I pressed a button and it recorded on button 1. The guitar was already down and when I pressed 1, it seems that I recorded over the guitar, which is impossible because he would have been hearing it to sing to. I realised the guitar was gone and Chris was impatiently beyond the window telling me he had to capture the song’s essence while it was fresh. Dare was in the room with me and I was asking him how to record on a second track. What a confusion of images and experiences. Sadly I can’t remember the song that Chris was singing, and sadly Chris is no longer with us.

Music today was The Doors‘ L.A. Woman (1971) because Olivia and I bought the T-shirts.

Music Of The Daze