About the Song
Vixy:
I was born in Seattle and I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. I'd always wanted
to write a song that expressed my deep love for this place. The Northwest has
everything: a beautiful city stretching from the hills to the water, national
parks and woodlands, tons of lakes and rivers, two mountain ranges, the Pacific
Ocean and Puget Sound, islands, rainforests, a major international port, a
literal (and historic) underground city, and an active volcano. All within
day-trip distance.
But most of all... it's green. Green green green. So much water and so much
green. When I had to move away for a while, a friend, predicting I'd be back,
remarked to me, "this place just says... life." And that summed
it up for me. Nowhere else that I've ever visited says "life" quite as
thoroughly as the Pacific Northwest.
No matter where I've traveled, I always knew I was coming home when I looked out
the window and saw a skyline shaped of nothing but the jagged lines of evergreen
trees.
About the Songwriting
Vixy:
Sometimes the best songs are the hardest. This one took years to write. There
was so much imagery that I wanted to cram into such a small space; it
needed not to be forever long, but it also needed to carry the feeling I wanted
to get across. It was years of just scattered phrases written down and
discarded and started over, and even after it finally had some structure, it
went through several incarnations before the final one.
One early incarnation had a verse about my years in southern California; how I
had to move there (you don't have a choice when you're a kid) and how there was
too much brown and not enough green. But it just wasn't working; as cute as it
might be to say "oh there's a color missing", it just wasn't right to have a
song about how much you love your home, and include a verse essentially dissing
someone else's. I was getting off track; this wasn't what I had intended to
say.
The second major incarnation was all images and nothing else. This one was
actually completed, and I think I even sang it in a filk circle somewhere,
though I don't remember where. I'd been trying to pack it full of childhood
images: my sister and I playing "don't touch the sand" on the beaches at
Whidbey Island, seeing how far we could run hopping along the driftwood logs;
climbing trees in the woods near my grade school; spending hours curled in a
comfy velvet armchair in my living room, watching storms whip the branches of
the evergreens in the backyards; sitting at that same window watching snow cover
everything... it went on and on. I tried to arrange it by chronology, and sort
of have all four seasons in each verse.
Trouble was, it was so completely jam-packed with imagery that there was no room
for emotion, even in the chorus. It was like looking at a slide show. It
didn't go over well where I sang it, and even I thought it was boring and
stilted. I was getting incredibly frustrated and just about ready to give up on
the whole idea.
It was on the way to a house filk that I finally decided to chuck nearly the
whole song and start over. I knew I'd have to let go of a lot of the images;
however badly I wanted to show everyone my entire photo album, the photos just
weren't the point. The first thing was to simplify the chorus; there's still
imagery there, but it's in much plainer language than it was. Then I had to
pick just a few photos for the verses, and describe them, again, in much less
flowery language than before.
It's funny; keeping it simple gave it a chance to let the emotion come through.
I think its main problem before was that it had been so choked with all the
prettiest words I could find that it wasn't me. I was trying to say so
much that it wound up not saying what I meant; when I stopped trying so hard to
say everything, that was when the song finally started to say the
important things.
Tony:
Normally, our collaborative songwriting process involves Vixy having most of the
lyrics written first, and a fairly strong idea about the melody. Then we sit
together and I work out chords to fit the melody. Sometimes it will be sort of a
push-pull thing, where my chord progression will dictate a new direction for
the melody, but usually Vix comes to me with the song mostly done. That was the
case with this song, except for the bridge. Vixy hadn't written any melody for a
bridge, and I seem to recall the lyrics for the bridge weren't even finished at
that point. We had the melody and chords for the chorus and verses completed
for her first iteration of the song, enough to perform it once in a filk
circle, a Baycon I believe it was. But that early version didn't have the
bridge yet, if I'm recalling correctly.
I ended up creating a bridge from whole cloth, improvising an electric
guitar melody over some minor chords that resolved back into the major chords
of the chorus. That seems to be my default method of making bridges for Vixy's songs:
Just go minor! It's a cheap trick, but it works really well.
Vixy then took that melody and modified it into something she
could sing and something that made more musical sense to her. Later, she
tailored lyrics to fit the melody, and we had a song.
This turns out to be the way things happen for many of the songs we write
together; Vixy's got the verses and choruses mostly solid on her own, and I end up doing
most of the middle bit. This has happened often enough that Vix has now
taken to calling me her "civil engineer" (because I make all her bridges for her,
you see).
The guitar arpeggios on the bridge, the bit during the lyrics before the guitar
solo, weren't originally intended to be in the song. But as I was putting the
pieces together and mixing the song, I realized that the bridge needed
to be stylistically distinct from the rest of the song, just "going minor" wasn't enough.
So on a whim, I sat down in the bedroom, played my current mix of the song,
and started picking away at odd chord inversions on the guitar
until I came up with something I liked. I was deliberately trying to do chords
high up on the neck on the three highest strings, drawing my inspiration from
David Gilmour pieces like "Us and Them". I seem to recall that I recorded it
right away, either that very night or the following day, then promptly forgot what
I'd done. I don't think I could reproduce it now without completely reverse-engineering
it all over again.
About the Recording
Tony:
Every aspect of this song was fun to record, although I have to say, I wasn't
present for part of it. The drums were done sight-unseen, by Scott Irwin in Kristoph's
studio in Oakland. We were very pleased with what he did, he captured the feel I was
looking for, and Kristoph's engineering meant that his performance was captured flawlessly.
The basic rhythm guitar parts worked in with the drums quite well and gave us something
solid for adding ornamentation. I was particularly happy with the way the bridge section
swells dramatically into the guitar solo over the chorus chords.
To emphasize the bridge guitar even more, I added a leslie
simulator to give it that characteristic swirl.
The solo itself was originally intended to be a soaring, legato electric guitar.
But each time I actually sat down to record a solo, I couldn't come up with anything that felt right.
I recorded and discarded a number of attempts. When I got the idea to try an acoustic solo, suddenly
everything just fell into place and felt right. In order to work, it couldn't be a traditional
solo made up of single notes. Instead, the only way I was able to get the music to flow was to
do chord inversions, variations, strums and arpeggios. I sat down in front of the mics and constructed
the solo a section at a time, stringing together groups of ascending chord changes coupled with
small embellishments, letting it build to the dramatic pause at the end of the chorus. I think
it's possibly my favorite guitar moment on the album.
But even with all of that detail, there was still something missing from the song. All along, as
I worked on the song, I kept hearing holes for another instrument. I even found myself deliberately
leaving spaces in the music that needed to be filled.
It was at this point that the song got nominated for a Pegasus,
just on the strength of people having enjoyed our public performances of it during the prior year.
As part of the nomination process, I needed to send in a recording of the song, so that voters who
hadn't yet heard it could download it. The recording I sent was an unfinished mix, with just the vocals,
drums, guitars, and an unfinished MIDI bass line. I was flabbergasted later when it won, but
for now, my goal was to finish it, and it was still missing some crucial glue.
When I told Vixy that I was having Alisa Garcia come down to do some piano, she was puzzled.
She knew Alisa was great, but she loved the song as it was, and couldn't understand what the
heck I was doing. I think she was worried I was somehow going to ruin the song by adding too
many layers. She was skeptical, and said so, but shrugged her shoulders and let me do what I wanted.
At this point I need to describe a bit of the way my basement studio is set up. My desk, which contains
the computer and monitors and all the other bits that I need to do the recording, is against the long
wall. Vixy's computer desk is next to mine, against the same wall, to my right. Blake's Kurzweil piano
synthesizer is actually behind us and to our left, facing away from us at an angle. So in order to do
any recording on the piano, the person playing the piano has to have their back to anyone sitting at
the desks. Additionally, since the piano is electronic, the usual steps required to isolate mic'd instruments
aren't needed; it plugs straight into the A/D converter, so we don't even need headphones. We can play
the mix through the studio monitors, and everyone in the room can hear what's going on as it's being played.
So Vixy decided she would sit at her computer, work on some digital art, and listen while we recorded.
There we were, the three of us, Alisa at the piano to my left and behind me, Vixy to my right.
We start tracking, and I'm more or less in charge of the recording session, giving Alisa direction
and tips as we work our way through the process of laying down the piano track. Vixy, not wanting to
distract from that dynamic, is being silent and just letting us work. Of course, Alisa's part is
just marvelous. I already knew it would be; I could hear it in my head before I even asked her to play
on the song. The song needed the piano part, and as Alisa played, I could finally hear the song
the way I'd always imagined it. Alisa had a few wonderful surprises up her sleeve, but by and large,
I knew she would be awesome, she was exceeding my expectations, and I told her so. My immediate
reaction to hearing her play the part was mostly a sense of relief and satisfaction.
Then I looked over to my right.
Vixy had tears literally streaming down her face, and she was carefully stifling her sobs so that Alisa
didn't get distracted by it. Alisa, consumed by her work and facing completely away from us both, had no idea.
I smiled at Vixy knowingly, reached over, and squeezed her hand. She smiled back and nodded,
and that's all we needed to say to each other about it.
When the session was done, poor Alisa, she couldn't understand why Vixy had been so quiet. She was worried
that, despite my assurances that she'd done great, somehow Vixy wasn't pleased. She was so relieved to
find out that Vixy's silence was because she was hiding tears of joy.
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