LONG ROAD I probably wrote this song in 2003. Its heart is the droning D arpeggio that runs throughout which is so good that I still find it hard to believe I came up with it. I consider myself to have some talent for songwriting based on coming up with a riff like that. The original lyrics were not about a circus performer. Like the majority of my songs, they were nebulous song cliches spouted on the fly as placeholders for real words later once the melody was down on tape before I forgot it. These placer words are often a surprisingly rich source of origin for the final words, and sometimes used as is. (Not here, though.) The idea of the circus performer came to me mostly from the song Wild Billys Circus Story by Bruce Springsteen. The song is on his 1973 album The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, which I listened to it a LOT in the 80s. Other songs from it, like Kittys Back, are burned into my soul. The crowd noise at the end was a late idea. I remembered the use of crowd noise in the song Rudy, on Supertramps album Crime of the Century, and how evocative that was. Also, a friend of mine produced an album in Vancouver in the 80s. I was visiting him at the studio when he was going to add the sound of a military helicopter to one of the songs he was producing. My first thought was that it was a terrible idea but, after hearing it, I was surprised to hear the dramatic dimension it gave to the song. (Also, in the powerful audio environment of a real recording studio, it sounded like a real helicopter was landing.) My voice isnt up to the challenge of holding these long notes, but what can you do?
Posted on: Wed, 07 Jan 2015 06:19:28 +0000
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