004 RUST
I’m pretty sure this happens to everyone that makes art/music:
putting individual ideas together starts to become a bigger work that seems like you planned it all along, but you don’t.
It’s like you just discover the zoom out tool or something. But just like in songwriting – it feels like it was already there and you’re the last one being let into the circle to know it.
I had recorded most of the album already, and I intended to add strings to as many songs as it made sense to. I felt like that was an emotional thread that was important to me, but not every song needed that thread. I was focused on the song ‘Half-Asleep,’ and I had ideas about the approach for the string parts, but as I started to get a feel for the sequence of the album, it seemed like ‘At The Forest Gate’ was a way to push off of the dock in a little boat for the first half of the album. ‘Half-Asleep’ was in the second half of the album in my mind and I thought that it would be nice to have a moment before it started the last half.
One journal entry I had when I was working on ‘Half-Asleep’ talked about how I felt some guilt that the visions I had been having were seeming to happen less often. As if the forest gate was starting to rust and grow old, and I felt a lot of sadness about that. That’s mentioned in ‘Half-Asleep,’ in verse 2, by the way. But here I thought about what this little section should be or feel like. My friend, Collins McLaughlin, was spearheading the string arrangement for ‘Half-Asleep,’ and I asked him about trying to fish for an interlude made from similar melodic content, but the general thought was that I didn’t feel like we needed new ideas or anything flashy. Collins understood exactly where we should go, and I loved his contributions and musicality on these two tracks (Rust/H-A) and I’m really grateful that he has been a part of this.
After he gave me the tracks, I thought about how I wanted it to feel, which is so artsy, I know. But it sounded great, and that hit my radar as just barely the wrong move, sonically. So I mixed it to feel pretty good overall, and then printed that to cassette in my Portastudio a number of times to experiment with tape type and EQ until it started to feel like it was living in a dream, or a vintage Disney movie. I tried some reverbs to offset the dryness of it, and that was cool but I couldn’t seem to stick the landing quite yet. My buddy Chad, who helped produce everything, and also mixed it all, ran with the reverb idea and created all of these moments where the reverb changes or gets big/small/wide/narrow/off. It felt like a great warmup for ‘Half-Asleep’ after he did that. …Like a beautiful distant dream that you are being pulled through, scene by scene. A dream that is getting more fuzzy at times but loses no magic when you’re lucky enough to be in there.
Rust.