Recording diary, day three: What A Woman's For.
After a convention-induced break -- I had to go to Seattle and Boston, Jeff had to go to Atlanta and various locations in the United Kingdom and Germany -- it was finally time to return to Mystic Fig and get back to work on Red Roses and Dead Things. Because nothing says 'hooray, we're all done traveling!' like getting together for a little plague-and-murder party, really. Especially not when you're talking about me and my friends. We're special that way. And by 'special' I mean 'don't go into the creepy old house, what are you, stupid?'.
With Jeff and I both back in the same time zone for the first time since the beginning of the year, we'd been looking for a good time to get me back into the studio...not to record any strictly new tracks, but to finally do my lead vocals for the songs we'd recorded previously. (For those who need a refresher: our session on day two was pretty much a wash for me, because I was too sick to record anything we had a hope in hell of being able to use later.) Thankfully, the horrible Martian death cold I picked up in Seattle in December has long since left the building, and so it was just a matter of finding a time that was good for the both of us. This process was made marginally more complex by the fact that a) we both have jobs, b) Jeff has kids, c) I'm trying to finish editing a novel, and d) Jeff and Maya are recording their own album, which, unsurprisingly, demands a certain amount of time and attention on his part.
Since we knew that what we had to do was limited to recording my parts on songs that were already essentially arranged, we didn't really need to have an entire day available to us -- a few hours would do. And that's why, when Jeff asked if I ask available on weekday nights, I immediately confirmed with Chris that he could be available to get me home after we finished, and told Jeff that Tuesday was good for me. That Tuesday was, in fact, awesome for me, and hey, can it be Tuesday right now? Lacking a time machine, we had to wait for Tuesday to roll around in the natural fashion, but once it did, it was time to party.
And yes, Brooke, we did all our partying WITH SCIENCE.
The participants:
* Me, on lead vocals and musical direction.
* Jeff 'Heavy-Metal Squid' Bohnhoff, on sound engineering and eventual world domination.
Also participating, if in a somewhat more behind-the-scenes way:
* Chris Mangum, on showing up to get me home in vaguely the same shape I left it in.
* Maya Bohnhoff, on making truly awesome baked fish for dinner (yum).
* Kristine Bohnhoff, on being effortlessly sardonic.
* Amanda Bohnhoff, on a seemingly all-natural sugar high and a possibly demonic amount of energy.
The itinerary for the day:
* Record lead vocals for 'The Black Death' (me).
* Record lead vocals for 'What A Woman's For -- album version' (me).
* Record lead vocals for 'What A Woman's For -- bonus version' (me).
Sadly, in the wonderful world of recording, being able to say 'this day is all about me' isn't actually a good thing, because what 'this day is all about me' really means is 'there will be no viable opportunities to throw someone else in the booth and hide beneath the sofa until the twitching stops'. See how I suffer for my art? I should get a medal, I swear.
Because I work in San Francisco, roughly a block and a half from the CalTrain station, we decided that I would get off work, rush over to catch the express train, and then ride in calm style to San Jose, where Jeff would collect me from the station, take me to the nearest 7-11 for Diet Dr Pepper and the all-important Giant Bottle of Water, and then head off to his place to get to work. The plan was to record until dinner, pause, eat dinner, and then record until we were done recording or we fell over dead of exhaustion, whichever happened to come first. Somewhere in there, Chris was going to show up -- craziness at his place of work meant that he couldn't say exactly when that was going to be -- and be ready and waiting to whisk me away when our work was done. It was a good plan. It had a good beat, and we could dance to it. Plus, Tuesday arrived, and I still wasn't sick, which was somewhere ten miles past 'awesome' and heading down the hill towards 'toasted amazingcakes with cheese'.
I caught my train without a hitch, thus proving that sometimes a plan does survive contact with the enemy, and nestled down into a seat on the last train, where I seemed less likely to get poked at by my fellow commuters. (This worked out pretty well, as San Francisco commuters are essentially lazy beasts, and only five people walked as far as that car with me. Six people in an entire train car does not constitute over-crowding. It barely constitutes 'sharing the air'. Unless one of them's a zombie.) I read Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill, and listened to my iPod, rich with songs about mad science and horror and things going horribly wrong, and proceeded to start getting myself into the mood to work on the album. This really wasn't hard. It turns out that I am naturally wired to be pretty much constantly in the mood to work on any album where I get to sing the line 'he needs a Lolita who can make him see it's better when the corpses are fresh'. I'm a simple girl.
After a little bit of confusion at the San Jose station (I walked right past Jeff's car, thus proving that he could make a very effective unseen serial killer if he ever felt the need), Jeff and I managed to find each other, and we were finally off! Stop number one: the 7-11, where the computer keeled over just as soon as I walked through the door. Seriously. It was like I was a really perky electro-magnetic pulse or something, because I walked in, and the computer fell down. They managed to get it rebooted by the time I reached the counter, but the scanners remained dead, and it took the clerks almost ten minutes to realize that they possessed the magical mystery power of actually inputting things by hand (gasp!), but I was eventually able to acquire my much-needed liquids, and fled back out to the car. Jeff was suitably amused by the reasons for my delay, and we were off again. Off our heads, off our rockers...
When entering the Bohnhoff home, you will often find yourself being enthusiastically barked at by their small, fluffy, ancient black and white dog, Radar. This time, I found myself enthusiastically barked at by their small, fluffy, tow-headed girlchild, Amanda, who seemed entirely pleased with her impression of the family dog. (Impressively enough, she managed to bark even more shrilly than he did.) Maya simply looked put-upon, thus proving that the barking wasn't a particularly new development. A taxing one, yes, but a new one? Not so very much. Amanda then proceeded to show me every Barbie she owned while Jeff got the studio ready, until he finally took something resembling mercy on my increasingly white-eyed expression, rescued me from his youngest daughter, and tossed me into a nicely soundproofed black box. Peace at last.
Running theme of the night: Jeff and I had both been blessed with a hearty dose of The Dumb. As in, 'I cannot brain tonight, I has The Dumb'. The box at Mystic Fig is nicely soundproofed, located in the garage, with multiple doors between the person in the box and the person outside the box. As a consequence, if things aren't set up correctly, the person in the box is pretty much cut off from the rest of the universe. I closed the door. In my headphones, Jeff's voice asked whether I could hear him. I answered in the affirmative. No reply. I asked if he could hear me. No reply. I had just concluded that he probably couldn't hear me when he came out into the garage, entered the booth, announced that he had The Dumb, and actually hooked up my microphone.
Oooooops.
First up: sound checking and determining my levels. Much like a surreal new version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, there we tried three ways of having me address the microphone -- too close, too far, and just right. Lest you think this sounds like an inconsequential thing, please understand that this took us roughly half an hour, and required me to sing the same six verses of 'The Black Death' over and over and over again. I've said, repeatedly, that this is the one song that I will always need a lyric sheet for. Well, by the time we finished the sound check and level-setting process, I was no longer quite so sure.
When the technical part of the party was finally over, it was time to start recording. Now, we reviewed my scratch tracks from the prior recording session, and they were, as expected, entirely unusable. We couldn't even salvage the spoken parts of 'The Black Death' -- they'd just sound wrong when you put them against a recording of me singing normally. It all had to go. After some discussion, we decided that the best way to attack the song was directly, and without hesitation: I was basically going to take a (metaphorical) running start and fling myself at it as hard as I could, right from the beginning. Once that was done, Jeff would scrape me off the windshield, and we'd do it again. And again. And again. Until he felt he had enough clean material to stitch together an end-to-end take.
Fortunately, this approach doesn't require me to do the song completely perfectly from one end to another. Given that 'The Black Death' is both very, very fast and very, very long, singing it perfectly all the way through verges on impossible, especially on the really tongue-twister-esque verses. Who was it that thought it was a good idea to sing a couplet rhyming 'leading to psychosis' and 'internalized necrosis'?
Oh, right. Um. Moving on...
Some of the train-wrecks we got out of the three full recording passes we made on the song -- yes, I sang 'The Black Death' all the way through three times in a row -- were really quite impressive. I started into the wrong verse a couple of times. I dropped words. I repaired my scansion on the fly (not all that unusual where I'm concerned, but still nerve-wracking for my poor engineers). And I came up with some really quite impressive new ways to damage and distort my own lyrics. My personal favorite was the part where I decided to sing 'by quarantine was thwarted' as 'by thwarantine was quarted', which really sounds like some sort of horrible medieval torture method. Although perhaps the word 'decided' is a little bit strong there, as really, it just happened.
Jeff, displaying the sort of caring and compassion that really make him such an excellent engineer, suggested that I take any of my problems up with the lyricist. Ha ha, Jeff. Ha ha.
After three full passes (and a few patches), it was time to break for dinner. Maya, playing the 'domestic goddess' role to the hilt, had prepared some truly awesome parchment-wrapped baked white fish with garlic, mushrooms, onions and tomatoes. There was also a blessedly undressed salad. Kris and I sat next to each other and stealthily exchanged croutons (mine) for unwanted fish (hers). It's always good to have compatible table scraps with the person next to you. Dinner was pleasant, friendly, and made deeply entertaining by Amanda's desire to explain every single thing about the United Kingdom in pause-free small-child-ese, but it was, eventually, time to put down our forks and get back to the recording board.
A studio recording is really a sort of Frankenstein's monster of the original song -- all stitched together from different takes and sources. Jeff and I settled by the mixing board, and proceeded to, as he put it, 'go shopping' through the three takes we'd already recorded, selecting the best verses and lyric phrases from the various tracks. Most of our material came, unsurprisingly, from the final take, where I'd been loosened up and fully exploiting the Schoolhouse Rock silliness of the lyrics; a few patches, however, came from the earlier takes. Jeff displayed his skill as a recording engineer, slicing them effortlessly free and sliding them into place with tiny patches, and by the time we reached the end of our shopping run, even I couldn't tell you where everything had come from.
We did need to re-record and punch in three tiny bits of the song -- the very last line, a chunk of the next-to-last verse, which was just a little too consistently breathless to be usable, and the second chorus, where I needed to hold out the grace note longer in order to match up with the backing vocalists. This took us another ten minutes, tops, and then we were done, done, done with my epic tale of pandemic death and horrible gore. And yes, it sounds fabulous, from the mournful Schoolhouse Rock spoken part at the beginning to the raw glee in my voice on the words 'internalized necrosis'. Jeff wants us to get someone to do a Flash animation, because it really does sound like we recorded it off Saturday morning television...in Hell.
Objective number one, lead vocals for 'The Black Death': accomplished. Time for objective number two: lead vocals for 'What A Woman's For'.
If 'The Black Death' is Schoolhouse Rock gone horribly wrong, 'What A Woman's For' is the sort of smoky, sultry torch song that you hear sung by stitched-together singers in dimly-lit bars with names like 'The Slab' or 'Igor's', where you don't want to look too closely at what's in your drink, and by the way, that's not an olive, it's an eyeball. It smokes, it slinks, and it's quite possibly eating your cat. If the Science-Fiction Channel wanted to do a modern-day Girl Genius film noir, this is the song the femme fatale would be singing when she first met our hero. It's just that kind of song. Talk about lyrical whiplash.
'What A Woman's For' was originally written as a solo piece (more on this later), and the lyric sheets available through my songbook are laid out accordingly. When Vixy, Amy and I performed the song in Maryland, however, we broke it down to a three-part Andrews Sisters-style harmony piece, and that's the one that we're recording for Red Roses. Issue: because my copy of the breakdown got taken away from me at the previous recording session, I didn't have it with me when I went into the booth. I was planning to just fake it...when I discovered that all our lyric sheets from last session were still in the booth! Yes! I recovered my vocal breakdown, utterly delighted, and positioned myself in front of the microphone. Jeff started the test track...
...and I promptly blew the levels. Oops. It turns out that, contrary to all logical expectations, I tend to sing 'What A Woman's For' substantially louder than I sing 'The Black Death'. (This actually makes a lot of sense, given that I have a lot more air on 'What A Woman's For', but it wasn't what we were expecting.) Scrambling followed, as Jeff fixed the settings, and it was time to record.
In case it wasn't clear from the above, I love this song. I love the harmonies, I love the lyrics, and I love the dialog that the arrangement creates, with everyone commenting on everyone else. There's a bit where the verse goes 'Consider Dr. Herbert West, M.D. -- he meant well'. Well, in the three-part arrangement, I sing 'Consider Dr. Herbert West, M.D.', and Maya tacks on 'He meant well', with Vixy adding a perfectly dubious 'I guess' that just delights me all the way down to my toes. There are moments like that scattered all the way through the song, just these little bits of 'you are obviously insane, but I am perfectly normal'. And they're perfect.
We ran me through the song three times; Chris arrived somewhere in the middle of take two, which Jeff advised me of during the pause to wind us back to the beginning of the song. Awesome. Clearly Chris makes things work better, because my third take was about as close to flawless as I think I'm ever likely to get -- I haven't run a one-take lead track that clean since Kristoph and I recorded my first attack on 'Still Catch the Tide'. Even our little scat bits managed to synchronize, to the point that it became an undead girl group, trying to sell you on the idea of going crazy to get the girl. And it was...I'm using the word 'perfect' a lot, but I don't think I've ever felt this good about a song the night we recorded it. This is why we're doing this album. For the love of MAD SCIENCE.
Now, remember, 'What A Woman's For' is getting double-super-special treatment, because it's the only song on the album that we're actually recording twice. The arrangement of the song that I perform with Paul Kwinn is totally different from the torchy goodness that's going on the album: it's the Elvira and Vincent Price comedy hour, with Paul interjecting to comment on, object to, and footnote the primary lyrics. This meant that after we ran my bits-and-pieces vocal three times, to get that down, we needed to turn right around and run me through twice more, now singing the complete song. This modifies the scansion a bit, which made me grateful for my original, unannotated lyric sheets, but in the end, it didn't really matter; I was fully warmed up and doing something that I loved, and we managed to nail it down in two takes. That, ladies and gentlemen, is science.
Jeff saved everything we'd spent the evening doing, and played some new tracks from the album he and Maya are recording while we discussed the plan of attack from here. He's just as detail-oriented as I am in a lot of ways, which makes working with him an absolute pleasure -- I update my to-do lists and plan sheets, and he approaches them as helpful guides, not poisonous serpents that might decide to try to take his face off with their horrible sharp fangs. We'll be slotting in recording sessions around his other duties for the next few months, and I'm sending him a ranked list of 'how many times can I sing this through before I kill and eat you' difficulties on the remaining songs, so that we can plan the recording sessions yet to come.
We were already up past my bedtime, so hugs were exchanged and Chris and I fled for the road, where caffeine and excitement enabled us to make it all the way back to Concord alive, if only barely. I babbled endlessly about the album on the way home. Chris, being a good Igor, took it with stoic endurance. Maybe he should be the one getting the album.
It's going to be an album.
Isn't that amazing?
With Jeff and I both back in the same time zone for the first time since the beginning of the year, we'd been looking for a good time to get me back into the studio...not to record any strictly new tracks, but to finally do my lead vocals for the songs we'd recorded previously. (For those who need a refresher: our session on day two was pretty much a wash for me, because I was too sick to record anything we had a hope in hell of being able to use later.) Thankfully, the horrible Martian death cold I picked up in Seattle in December has long since left the building, and so it was just a matter of finding a time that was good for the both of us. This process was made marginally more complex by the fact that a) we both have jobs, b) Jeff has kids, c) I'm trying to finish editing a novel, and d) Jeff and Maya are recording their own album, which, unsurprisingly, demands a certain amount of time and attention on his part.
Since we knew that what we had to do was limited to recording my parts on songs that were already essentially arranged, we didn't really need to have an entire day available to us -- a few hours would do. And that's why, when Jeff asked if I ask available on weekday nights, I immediately confirmed with Chris that he could be available to get me home after we finished, and told Jeff that Tuesday was good for me. That Tuesday was, in fact, awesome for me, and hey, can it be Tuesday right now? Lacking a time machine, we had to wait for Tuesday to roll around in the natural fashion, but once it did, it was time to party.
And yes, Brooke, we did all our partying WITH SCIENCE.
The participants:
* Me, on lead vocals and musical direction.
* Jeff 'Heavy-Metal Squid' Bohnhoff, on sound engineering and eventual world domination.
Also participating, if in a somewhat more behind-the-scenes way:
* Chris Mangum, on showing up to get me home in vaguely the same shape I left it in.
* Maya Bohnhoff, on making truly awesome baked fish for dinner (yum).
* Kristine Bohnhoff, on being effortlessly sardonic.
* Amanda Bohnhoff, on a seemingly all-natural sugar high and a possibly demonic amount of energy.
The itinerary for the day:
* Record lead vocals for 'The Black Death' (me).
* Record lead vocals for 'What A Woman's For -- album version' (me).
* Record lead vocals for 'What A Woman's For -- bonus version' (me).
Sadly, in the wonderful world of recording, being able to say 'this day is all about me' isn't actually a good thing, because what 'this day is all about me' really means is 'there will be no viable opportunities to throw someone else in the booth and hide beneath the sofa until the twitching stops'. See how I suffer for my art? I should get a medal, I swear.
Because I work in San Francisco, roughly a block and a half from the CalTrain station, we decided that I would get off work, rush over to catch the express train, and then ride in calm style to San Jose, where Jeff would collect me from the station, take me to the nearest 7-11 for Diet Dr Pepper and the all-important Giant Bottle of Water, and then head off to his place to get to work. The plan was to record until dinner, pause, eat dinner, and then record until we were done recording or we fell over dead of exhaustion, whichever happened to come first. Somewhere in there, Chris was going to show up -- craziness at his place of work meant that he couldn't say exactly when that was going to be -- and be ready and waiting to whisk me away when our work was done. It was a good plan. It had a good beat, and we could dance to it. Plus, Tuesday arrived, and I still wasn't sick, which was somewhere ten miles past 'awesome' and heading down the hill towards 'toasted amazingcakes with cheese'.
I caught my train without a hitch, thus proving that sometimes a plan does survive contact with the enemy, and nestled down into a seat on the last train, where I seemed less likely to get poked at by my fellow commuters. (This worked out pretty well, as San Francisco commuters are essentially lazy beasts, and only five people walked as far as that car with me. Six people in an entire train car does not constitute over-crowding. It barely constitutes 'sharing the air'. Unless one of them's a zombie.) I read Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill, and listened to my iPod, rich with songs about mad science and horror and things going horribly wrong, and proceeded to start getting myself into the mood to work on the album. This really wasn't hard. It turns out that I am naturally wired to be pretty much constantly in the mood to work on any album where I get to sing the line 'he needs a Lolita who can make him see it's better when the corpses are fresh'. I'm a simple girl.
After a little bit of confusion at the San Jose station (I walked right past Jeff's car, thus proving that he could make a very effective unseen serial killer if he ever felt the need), Jeff and I managed to find each other, and we were finally off! Stop number one: the 7-11, where the computer keeled over just as soon as I walked through the door. Seriously. It was like I was a really perky electro-magnetic pulse or something, because I walked in, and the computer fell down. They managed to get it rebooted by the time I reached the counter, but the scanners remained dead, and it took the clerks almost ten minutes to realize that they possessed the magical mystery power of actually inputting things by hand (gasp!), but I was eventually able to acquire my much-needed liquids, and fled back out to the car. Jeff was suitably amused by the reasons for my delay, and we were off again. Off our heads, off our rockers...
When entering the Bohnhoff home, you will often find yourself being enthusiastically barked at by their small, fluffy, ancient black and white dog, Radar. This time, I found myself enthusiastically barked at by their small, fluffy, tow-headed girlchild, Amanda, who seemed entirely pleased with her impression of the family dog. (Impressively enough, she managed to bark even more shrilly than he did.) Maya simply looked put-upon, thus proving that the barking wasn't a particularly new development. A taxing one, yes, but a new one? Not so very much. Amanda then proceeded to show me every Barbie she owned while Jeff got the studio ready, until he finally took something resembling mercy on my increasingly white-eyed expression, rescued me from his youngest daughter, and tossed me into a nicely soundproofed black box. Peace at last.
Running theme of the night: Jeff and I had both been blessed with a hearty dose of The Dumb. As in, 'I cannot brain tonight, I has The Dumb'. The box at Mystic Fig is nicely soundproofed, located in the garage, with multiple doors between the person in the box and the person outside the box. As a consequence, if things aren't set up correctly, the person in the box is pretty much cut off from the rest of the universe. I closed the door. In my headphones, Jeff's voice asked whether I could hear him. I answered in the affirmative. No reply. I asked if he could hear me. No reply. I had just concluded that he probably couldn't hear me when he came out into the garage, entered the booth, announced that he had The Dumb, and actually hooked up my microphone.
Oooooops.
First up: sound checking and determining my levels. Much like a surreal new version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, there we tried three ways of having me address the microphone -- too close, too far, and just right. Lest you think this sounds like an inconsequential thing, please understand that this took us roughly half an hour, and required me to sing the same six verses of 'The Black Death' over and over and over again. I've said, repeatedly, that this is the one song that I will always need a lyric sheet for. Well, by the time we finished the sound check and level-setting process, I was no longer quite so sure.
When the technical part of the party was finally over, it was time to start recording. Now, we reviewed my scratch tracks from the prior recording session, and they were, as expected, entirely unusable. We couldn't even salvage the spoken parts of 'The Black Death' -- they'd just sound wrong when you put them against a recording of me singing normally. It all had to go. After some discussion, we decided that the best way to attack the song was directly, and without hesitation: I was basically going to take a (metaphorical) running start and fling myself at it as hard as I could, right from the beginning. Once that was done, Jeff would scrape me off the windshield, and we'd do it again. And again. And again. Until he felt he had enough clean material to stitch together an end-to-end take.
Fortunately, this approach doesn't require me to do the song completely perfectly from one end to another. Given that 'The Black Death' is both very, very fast and very, very long, singing it perfectly all the way through verges on impossible, especially on the really tongue-twister-esque verses. Who was it that thought it was a good idea to sing a couplet rhyming 'leading to psychosis' and 'internalized necrosis'?
Oh, right. Um. Moving on...
Some of the train-wrecks we got out of the three full recording passes we made on the song -- yes, I sang 'The Black Death' all the way through three times in a row -- were really quite impressive. I started into the wrong verse a couple of times. I dropped words. I repaired my scansion on the fly (not all that unusual where I'm concerned, but still nerve-wracking for my poor engineers). And I came up with some really quite impressive new ways to damage and distort my own lyrics. My personal favorite was the part where I decided to sing 'by quarantine was thwarted' as 'by thwarantine was quarted', which really sounds like some sort of horrible medieval torture method. Although perhaps the word 'decided' is a little bit strong there, as really, it just happened.
Jeff, displaying the sort of caring and compassion that really make him such an excellent engineer, suggested that I take any of my problems up with the lyricist. Ha ha, Jeff. Ha ha.
After three full passes (and a few patches), it was time to break for dinner. Maya, playing the 'domestic goddess' role to the hilt, had prepared some truly awesome parchment-wrapped baked white fish with garlic, mushrooms, onions and tomatoes. There was also a blessedly undressed salad. Kris and I sat next to each other and stealthily exchanged croutons (mine) for unwanted fish (hers). It's always good to have compatible table scraps with the person next to you. Dinner was pleasant, friendly, and made deeply entertaining by Amanda's desire to explain every single thing about the United Kingdom in pause-free small-child-ese, but it was, eventually, time to put down our forks and get back to the recording board.
A studio recording is really a sort of Frankenstein's monster of the original song -- all stitched together from different takes and sources. Jeff and I settled by the mixing board, and proceeded to, as he put it, 'go shopping' through the three takes we'd already recorded, selecting the best verses and lyric phrases from the various tracks. Most of our material came, unsurprisingly, from the final take, where I'd been loosened up and fully exploiting the Schoolhouse Rock silliness of the lyrics; a few patches, however, came from the earlier takes. Jeff displayed his skill as a recording engineer, slicing them effortlessly free and sliding them into place with tiny patches, and by the time we reached the end of our shopping run, even I couldn't tell you where everything had come from.
We did need to re-record and punch in three tiny bits of the song -- the very last line, a chunk of the next-to-last verse, which was just a little too consistently breathless to be usable, and the second chorus, where I needed to hold out the grace note longer in order to match up with the backing vocalists. This took us another ten minutes, tops, and then we were done, done, done with my epic tale of pandemic death and horrible gore. And yes, it sounds fabulous, from the mournful Schoolhouse Rock spoken part at the beginning to the raw glee in my voice on the words 'internalized necrosis'. Jeff wants us to get someone to do a Flash animation, because it really does sound like we recorded it off Saturday morning television...in Hell.
Objective number one, lead vocals for 'The Black Death': accomplished. Time for objective number two: lead vocals for 'What A Woman's For'.
If 'The Black Death' is Schoolhouse Rock gone horribly wrong, 'What A Woman's For' is the sort of smoky, sultry torch song that you hear sung by stitched-together singers in dimly-lit bars with names like 'The Slab' or 'Igor's', where you don't want to look too closely at what's in your drink, and by the way, that's not an olive, it's an eyeball. It smokes, it slinks, and it's quite possibly eating your cat. If the Science-Fiction Channel wanted to do a modern-day Girl Genius film noir, this is the song the femme fatale would be singing when she first met our hero. It's just that kind of song. Talk about lyrical whiplash.
'What A Woman's For' was originally written as a solo piece (more on this later), and the lyric sheets available through my songbook are laid out accordingly. When Vixy, Amy and I performed the song in Maryland, however, we broke it down to a three-part Andrews Sisters-style harmony piece, and that's the one that we're recording for Red Roses. Issue: because my copy of the breakdown got taken away from me at the previous recording session, I didn't have it with me when I went into the booth. I was planning to just fake it...when I discovered that all our lyric sheets from last session were still in the booth! Yes! I recovered my vocal breakdown, utterly delighted, and positioned myself in front of the microphone. Jeff started the test track...
...and I promptly blew the levels. Oops. It turns out that, contrary to all logical expectations, I tend to sing 'What A Woman's For' substantially louder than I sing 'The Black Death'. (This actually makes a lot of sense, given that I have a lot more air on 'What A Woman's For', but it wasn't what we were expecting.) Scrambling followed, as Jeff fixed the settings, and it was time to record.
In case it wasn't clear from the above, I love this song. I love the harmonies, I love the lyrics, and I love the dialog that the arrangement creates, with everyone commenting on everyone else. There's a bit where the verse goes 'Consider Dr. Herbert West, M.D. -- he meant well'. Well, in the three-part arrangement, I sing 'Consider Dr. Herbert West, M.D.', and Maya tacks on 'He meant well', with Vixy adding a perfectly dubious 'I guess' that just delights me all the way down to my toes. There are moments like that scattered all the way through the song, just these little bits of 'you are obviously insane, but I am perfectly normal'. And they're perfect.
We ran me through the song three times; Chris arrived somewhere in the middle of take two, which Jeff advised me of during the pause to wind us back to the beginning of the song. Awesome. Clearly Chris makes things work better, because my third take was about as close to flawless as I think I'm ever likely to get -- I haven't run a one-take lead track that clean since Kristoph and I recorded my first attack on 'Still Catch the Tide'. Even our little scat bits managed to synchronize, to the point that it became an undead girl group, trying to sell you on the idea of going crazy to get the girl. And it was...I'm using the word 'perfect' a lot, but I don't think I've ever felt this good about a song the night we recorded it. This is why we're doing this album. For the love of MAD SCIENCE.
Now, remember, 'What A Woman's For' is getting double-super-special treatment, because it's the only song on the album that we're actually recording twice. The arrangement of the song that I perform with Paul Kwinn is totally different from the torchy goodness that's going on the album: it's the Elvira and Vincent Price comedy hour, with Paul interjecting to comment on, object to, and footnote the primary lyrics. This meant that after we ran my bits-and-pieces vocal three times, to get that down, we needed to turn right around and run me through twice more, now singing the complete song. This modifies the scansion a bit, which made me grateful for my original, unannotated lyric sheets, but in the end, it didn't really matter; I was fully warmed up and doing something that I loved, and we managed to nail it down in two takes. That, ladies and gentlemen, is science.
Jeff saved everything we'd spent the evening doing, and played some new tracks from the album he and Maya are recording while we discussed the plan of attack from here. He's just as detail-oriented as I am in a lot of ways, which makes working with him an absolute pleasure -- I update my to-do lists and plan sheets, and he approaches them as helpful guides, not poisonous serpents that might decide to try to take his face off with their horrible sharp fangs. We'll be slotting in recording sessions around his other duties for the next few months, and I'm sending him a ranked list of 'how many times can I sing this through before I kill and eat you' difficulties on the remaining songs, so that we can plan the recording sessions yet to come.
We were already up past my bedtime, so hugs were exchanged and Chris and I fled for the road, where caffeine and excitement enabled us to make it all the way back to Concord alive, if only barely. I babbled endlessly about the album on the way home. Chris, being a good Igor, took it with stoic endurance. Maybe he should be the one getting the album.
It's going to be an album.
Isn't that amazing?