As you may know, I wrote many songs and things in my twenties and some in my thirties, but mostly the songs sat mouldering in half-finished forms on cassette tapes, ADATs and in hard drives.
I have bucketloads of recording gear now, but the one thing that I'm not wired for is recording drums. My recording interface only takes two inputs at a time, and for drums I'd want at least four. Using samples and electronic drums just isn't the same for me. A human drummer adds some english to the moves of the song, feels where it's going and also adds some human error, which sounds real. So when I played at the open stage a couple of weeks ago, and George, who owns the local music store, offered to record drums for me in his back room studio, at a ridiculously reasonable rate, I went for it.
I had to get off my lees and charge up enough confidence and soul and ambition to record some rough versions of some songs, to metronome. I went to the darkened music store after hours, sat at George's recording desk while he fooled with drums and switched cymbals and snares and mics around quite a bit between songs, and pressed record and gave him my impressions of how well his parts were complimenting the three songs we tackled.
As is fairly usual, George wandered slightly ahead and behind the metronome in place, coming back to it fairly quickly, but meaning the voice/guitar were not 100% lined up with the drums. You don't want them 100% lined up, necessarily, but you want them to be close. So all the next week I went home with the best intentions of charging up that confidence, soul and ambition, and recording new vocals and guitar, edified and reflective of the new drums, and covering their slight variances in tempo.
After a nap, I did it Friday evening. Would have been good to have a genuine bass guitar player, someone better at playing fiddly acoustic lead bits, or singing higher than I can. But I made do.
The song is called A Bigger Frame and if you click it and hear it and derive any pleasure or interest from it at all, it would be just dandy if you'd comment and let me know that happened. It's from back in the day when my room-mate Bill wanted to collaborate, and neither of us were very good at that, being rather "Roger Waters" in our mentalities and methods. With this one, I wrote the words, and let him make music to it, and then finessed it a bit to my liking.
The idea behind the song is that when you decide to make changes in your life, and find you are growing into a bigger, (better, stronger, faster) person, it's not really about painting over the old picture in the frame, so much as getting a much bigger frame for you (the painted canvas) to sit in, and painting more of the picture, so to speak. The words go like this:
Bigger Frame
Flesh
Is feeling old
Nothing much will change
Nothing new or strange
Body still does what it must
But with reluctance and no capacity for joy.
You've got to change but strange to say
Some's got to be some more of the same
More than yourself but still yourself
Paint more of the picture and fill
A bigger frame
Heart
Feels like a bolt
Of liquid lightning, always tightening
Stuck inside a dusty Mason jar
Once out it could go anywhere at all
Will
Will feel bewildered
A tearing cloth, sewn to both
Body doesn't feel like being naked
but the heart wants to run free.
Push out the boundaries, be sure of this
They sure won't want to go
How much is there to you anyway?
If you don't break out of where you are
It's sure you'll never know.
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