28th
A little under a year ago, a few of us were sitting around talking about Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago and it’s source material and at some point during the conversation, Rachel has said “Someone should write an EP about me.”. I silently agreed in my head, and later pitched the idea to Ben and Heather as a birthday present for her for 2009, and they both loved it. We tossed around some ideas for content, as there was an absolute trove of source material to work with.
We started a google document, threw around a bunch of names and eventually had six concept songs to work with. The whole thing was going to be collaborative group effort, but as time went by, it became obvious that wasn’t really going to be effective. The initial track list two extra songs - Rachel Friendly Menus and a cover of the Due South theme song. We decided to cull the extras and instead of one big project, split it out into three songs, that each of us would be responsible for. We’d each utilise each other’s skills to make sure they got written and recorded properly and get the appropriate artwork done. So, with Heather on paints, Ben on Photoshop and myself on Cubase, we set to work.
I started working on a song with my old Fender, and put together a song that slowly developed over the course of the last six months. Heather wrote some lyrics and when I read them and thought about how her singing style could work, came up with a kind of dirty indie pop rock feel and eventually wrote some poppy guitar riffs for it. Ben spent a few months playing with GarageBand on Jimmy’s old laptop sequencing together a Massive Attack-esque electronic piece. We all went through a number of revisions of the writing and demoing on our own before eventually convening the week before her birthday to put it together.
We had what can only be described as a day of complete, repeated failure. It’d been nearly a year since Ben & I had been in the studio and we were all tired and sick, and nothing worked. I left my recording device and microphones at home, I fucked up the recording of Ben’s drums for both our songs several times, I left the recordings AT the studio .. it was the worst. Ben headed off and Heather & I got stuck into her vocals. We got through some first drafts and some singing lessons and eventually called it a night. I took to doing my guitars and eventually booked in two more sessions during the week.
Heather and I went through some more singing techniques and drank some cider and had another go. Her voice rocked the fuck out this time, and we ended up keeping her original vocals for the choruses, double-tracked them and panned them out, which sounded great. The following night, I sat up and worked on a demo vocal line for Ben’s song, and the night after that, Ben came around to make edits, replaced my suggested vocals with his own singing and the three of us did final tweaks on the production.
The day of the event, Ben and Heather cut together all the art, burnt the cds and assembled the jewel cases in preparation for the big handover. She loved it. Eventually after dinner we headed back to Bowen Palace and listened, and I could not have been more pleased with the reaction. All that hard work had paid off. I have a massive satisfied smile on my face just now thinking about it. We did good. Heather, Ben, great work kids. I’m so happy with what we’ve made.
Happy birthday Rack.
Here is the finished product, internetised for all you non-IRL-ers:
http://loss4words.com/music/fcas_-_the_rachel_ep.html
