Recording Heat Stroke, Pt. 10

Here we are in week 10 of recording of Heat Stroke. In last weeks blog, I said it would be the second to last one in this Recording Heat Stroke series. But then I realized I plan on working on new songs until September 30th. So there will still be new stuff to talk about next week. It’s also possible that I will be completely done with everything by the time next Friday rolls around, and that will make for a more exciting post, maybe. Anyway, what have I been doing for the last week?

Well, last weekend I whipped up the beginnings of 2 new songs. Already, I’m pretty proud of them. One is basically 100% completed, and I like it a lot. Musically it’s pretty simple, but I don’t think I’ve ever created a song like it before. It’s 2 minutes long, and the second minute of the song is basically a heavy/loud version of the first minute, which is essentially wimpy and bad singing over droning ambience and an uncharacteristically tuneful clean guitar part. Lyrically, it’s mostly comprised of stuff I had written years ago actually. And right now, it’s the most lyric-heavy song on Heat Stroke. That may change though, depending on how these other songs I’m working on turn out. I tend to get a rough “sketch” of a song completed, listen to it for a few days, and then after sort of feeling out what it needs, I make additions and changes. So right now, there are 3 songs that are more or less 80% done. I just need to do a little more to them. I like that feeling opposed to wanting to create 3 new songs from scratch.

Another song I started working on last weekend is a little disco-ish. I wanted to do another song that sort of sounded like “Burn It Down” when I began working on it. I can’t say that’s how it’s going to sound when it’s done, but that was the plan. Compared to the others, this song and “Burn It Down” are the most traditional sounding songs. By saying “traditional,” I just mean there are fairly precise intro, verse, chorus, and outro musical parts.

I’ll surely go into this more in depth in a week or two, but I’ve realized that Heat Stroke is going to be almost completely different than what I planned it to be. Like, I wanted all the songs to have the same kind of feeling or sound…that’s not happening. It’s also not as heavy as I wanted it to be. But it’s not done, so maybe that will change if there are a couple more heavy songs that appear in the tracklist. Right now, “Hotter Than a Mothereffer” is the only heavy metal/screamy song, and my idea was that all the songs would be like that.

I can honestly say that even though my plans fell through a little, it may actually be for the best. I mean, it’s preferable to not have all the songs sound the same, and I wasn’t trying to go in different musical directions, but I did, very much. There are elements of industrial metal, southern rock, and wussy sad crap. I guess I’m proud of that, especially since, again, I didn’t set out to be eclectic. The songs just came out of me. That’s probably dumb and cliché sounding, but it’s true.

Yeah, I don’t want to write an entire retrospective just yet, so I’ll stop here. If you were wanting song samples this week, sorry, but not yet. As my self-imposed recording deadline is approaching (September 30th), I think I can accurately estimate that I’ll have 8 tracks completed for Heat Stroke. So that’s cool. Originally, I was shooting for 5, and I believe all the songs except for maybe the intro are strong pieces of music, or whatever they can be called.

So…thanks for reading, and leave a comment below and/or hit me up on Twitter.