Recorded music, as an abstraction, is in the business of convincing you that the musician is there, in your living room, in your ear, giving you a personal concert. At your beck and call. It's unreasonably effective at this. Two (often one these days or, much less often, four) speakers are all you really need.
As you might guess, given that this post exists, there's quite a lot of heavy lifting going on in the background to create this impression. Forgetting about how the actual, physical and technological infrastructure comes to exist: the internet, computers, tape reels, delivery vans, vinyl discs, CD printers, DAW software, audio plugins, etc. etc. we're only going to focus on what we do as a band to create the music that you're (hopefully) enjoying. We'll talk about it in six parts:
- Writing
- Rehearsing
- Recording
- Mixing
- Mastering
- Release
I. Writing
This is the nebulous bit. The part where a small worm of an idea starts wriggling into your mind. You need to feed it to make it strong enough so it doesn't only worm through the softest, easiest pathways. In a rock band like ours, you want to be original, but, in a way, it's possible to be too original. Then people start thinking of you as a weird, avant-garde, novelty act. Not that there's anything wrong with being a weird, avant-garde, novelty act, it's just you're likely better off being one on purpose. So there are constraints, which is a running theme for Automatic Panic. We want to bring in new ideas while still remaining recognizably in-genre so that when we do something quirky, it actually stands out.
These days, we tend to start with musical ideas jammed out on guitar and drums. One of us will start with a riff and we'll both start exploring it. Sometimes the riff has been circling overhead for a while and this is the moment it really strikes and sometimes a whole new thing comes flowing out like wine out of a knocked-over bottle. Usually it's apparent pretty quickly if there's a song there.
Then we sit on it.
We don't really mean to but it can take a while before we even have a title or vocal melody. Partly it's because this band isn't a full-time thing so we'll seed an idea in one sesssion and then not play together for a few weeks so it develops slowly (in our eyes anyway - looking back, I think we're actually relatively prolific compared to other, similar, artists).
In almost every case, the full lyrics of the song come after the music. I find it much easier to write a melody to music than vice versa and much easier to write lyrics to a melody. Or at least, much easier not to write bad lyrics to a melody. It's those constraints at work again. But a melody also lends itself to certain sounds, which point you in the direction of certain words that you can craft and hone towards an idea. In some songs, just the way the words sound is more important than what they say. In It Might Get Loud (2008), a guitarist documentary with The Edge, Jimmy Page, and Jack White, The Edge plays some demo tapes of Where the Streets Have No Name and you can hear Bono singing gibberish over the top of the band. He's doing the same thing: searching for a melody and the vowels and consonants that fit into it.
A rare exception to this pattern is an upcoming song, Ghost In The Backhouse, whose lyrics were written by Andrew. But again, parts of the original lyrics and rough melody idea are re-shaped around the actual mechanics of singing the damned thing! This is probably more akin to the process of musicians such as Elton John and composer Alan Menken, who receive lyrics from dedicated lyricists. If you're receiving your lyric sheet from Tim Rice then you probably don't want to mess with the words too much, so it's a different skill altogether.
When we're working on an album, we need to consider how the new song will fit amongst the others, if it works musically and thematically. If an otherwise good song doesn't fit, we'll leave it out and keep it on the shelf for later. That way, we can keep the album lean and focused. For singles, we don't have to worry about this kind of stuff and just fire the song out into the world. Shootin' straight from the hip, just like the early days of rock 'n' roll!
Once we're happy with the shape of the song, we can then move over to the next step: rehearsal.