Recording Heat Stroke Pt. 1
A few days ago on Twitter, I tweeted something about blogging about the recording of this EP (or whatever this particular of songs could be considered). For those not in the know, I generally record in spurts, but sometimes one of my spurts is 3 or 4 months because I’m recording up to 20 songs. I’ll save the upsides and downsides of that for later, but because of those downsides and other reasons, I decided to strive to write and record 4 or 5 songs in a relatively short period of time.
Now, summer is a season that I have a love/hate relationship with. I don’t go out much, so I’m usually cooped up sweating in the summer. Last year it was over 100 degrees in the SuavéStudio. I was feeling less energetic last summer, so I didn’t feel like documenting the heat very much. But this year I thought it would be fun to since I’m in slightly better spirits than I was last year at this time.
And so Heat Stroke was born. As always, my songs are about 90% nonsense/silly stuff and 10% genuine poetic stuff, at least in my opinion. Ever since I began writing and recording music…actually, maybe even before that, when I was just thinking about writing and recording music, I knew it would be something I would enjoy doing for a long time. So right from the start I knew if I wrote super heartfelt songs and spilled my emotions into every song, I’d be out of ideas very quickly. So I had the foresight to only hint at pseudo-deep ideas in any of my songs. Call it a cop-out or evidence that I’m not a good songwriter or whatever, but it’s a line of thinking that works for me. I haven’t experienced much, and I don’t really plan on experiencing much either, so it keeps me from getting bored with it if nothing else. I mean, the way I do things currently, I can have 20 songs about the same thing and no one would even know.
Anyway, Heat Stroke is the name of this small project I’m working on. On the surface, it’s a juvenile musical essay about how crappy hot weather can be, but to me, it’s more than that. Like I mentioned above, 10% of what I do is half-serious stuff. So, for example, the first song I started working for this is called “Hotter Than a Mothereffer.” It’s very very lyrically dense, but by the time it’s finished, it’s going to be a perfect example of what I strive to get all my songs to be. There’s going to be one, maybe two sentences that are anything other than mindless drivel. Maybe 10 seconds of semi-serious content, and that’s what the song will be to me. Everyone else will understandably focus on the rest of the song, and that’s cool, but in order for me to be satisfied with one of my own songs, it needs to have just a little bit of seriousness in it.
This has been Part 1 of my textual documentation of Heat Stroke. I plan on posting more of these pretty frequently.
[…] recall all the minute details about the production of it. But hey, I just discovered that I wrote a 12-part blog series on the recording of Heat Stroke. Holy crap. Anyway, this is still going up late, but only by a couple weeks (and a couple years, […]