All Our Yesterdays: Difference between revisions

   

Like a lot of kids, when I was growing up I was kind of stubborn, and although I obviously loved my parents, I didn't always show it - kids can be like that. I think they knew I loved them and cared about them, but I was just not very good at telling them. After my dad passed away, I started feeling unusually sad, particularly so because I was always left wondering if he ever did know how much I loved him.

I tried writing some lyrics for this piece, but I couldn't express them. I called Rowanne, played it for her and explained the feeling, and that I wanted the title to be "Endomorph," something that's trapped inside something else, just the way I felt. She wrote it, and like she usually does, she just put a big frog in my throat. She did the same thing with "All Our Yesterdays," from Atavachron: I was just in tears, man. It was incredible. She'd written words that said more than I would have imagined I ever could have. The problem was that I'd written it for me, and it was just outside her range. She could sing it up an octave, but I wanted the melody to be inside the register of the chords. We tried transposing it, and it started not sounding dark or somber enough. I remember my dad used to say, "This tune sounds great in this key." Then he'd play it in a lot of different keys and say, "But listen - it doesn't sound right in this one." Sometimes you can get away with a half-step in either direction, but even then it often doesn't work. I tried it again myself, and I couldn't do it, man. I might have been able to 10, 15 years ago, but I was just croaking and sounding terrible. A few people tried, and then Craig Copeland, whom I met through Chad - who introduced me to Rowanne, as well - came in, and he really sang it great.

Under the second verse there's a weird, ominous undercurrent.

It was actually a resampled voice. It was taken way out of key, completely off, then we took other samples at different notes, mixed them together, and made another sample as the combination of all of them in that one note. Sonically, it wasn't as nice as I would have liked, but it did the job inasmuch as it had the spooky vibe about it - there's a lot of air in the sound. I'd also been working with the Steinberg Tx7 programmer, to get something to simulate the unique sound of a PPG synthesizer. I did two PPGish sounds and blended those with the voice sound That was the bulk of the piece.

Did the piece come off with the kind of emotional breadth you'd intended?

I don't know. By the time I finish an album, I'm numb. I don't even know whether any of it's good. You think, "Oh, Jesus, what did I just play? Was that the biggest load or what?" There's no way to know. You just say, "I think it was alright," and try again the next day. But sometimes you just have to get away from it. You have to remember what it was feeling like to you when you first did it. I usually come up with the idea really quick, so if the feeling is strong enough in the beginning, when I strike on something I think is okay, it will usually return later. Quite often I work to a point where I just can't tell. I won't listen to it for a while, and then I'll hear it later and go, "Yeah. It was alright."

Lets talk about something more pleasant and go back to your last LP but one, “Atavachron”. Recently I saw a replay of one of the episodes of Star Trek in which on a certain moment some kind of alien says to Spock, pointing to a machine: 'This, mr. Spock, is the Atavachron'



"I love that episode, the idea of a machine with which the population of that planet goes back to its own history to escape the destruction of that planet. In any case I'm a Star Trek-fan. I also love that word: 'Atava' from "Atavistic' and 'Chron' form 'Chronological'. 'All Our Yesterdays' was the title of that episode, and I've used it for one of the tracks, a reflective piece of music. I try to visualize music; mostly it's a word or a happening and that gives me inspiration for a piece of music. On my new LP there's a song '4:15 Bradford Exect'. I was born in Bradford an often took the train from London to visit my family. In this song I've tried to play a guitarsolo from seven minutes without one repetition, just like the constant changing landscape out of a driving train. With "Atavachron" it was something familiar. In the late evening I often sit in the studio. And than, with all the lights out, the only thing that gives some light are the little lamps of the mixing consule. Than it's not hard at all to imagine you're in a spaceship."