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9 comments:
I don't have to click to listen - I can hear it all perfectly in my head as I read :)
Now you've got me listening to ARK from the beginning again...
Are you complaining?
Not at all.
Fixed a couple typos and reduced the size of the lettering.
Mama and I are cool as ice cream. Beautiful lyrics and perfect music - love the "cello" or whatever it was that came in at just the right time and Brendan's voice isn't bad, is it? The photos were a nice addition. Nice atmosphere for the song and I really like them. The Sailing Ship painting is Wow! Great color, composition, and texture. The other is very peaceful. One thing: the song is lovely, but it Could put me to sleep, but in a good way.
=D
Glad you like it - you seem to appreciate the same things about it as I do. I agree, though, it's VERY deliberate in unfolding and probably not best to listen to when you're tired.
I love the paintings, too. I'll try to find the names of who did them. I like the themes of exploration, sailing into the unknown. The album this is from is called "Ark" by the way so the boat can be a play on that - trying to find some place untouched by mankind's floods (figurative or literal). And both paintings feature crescent moons, playing off the song's title.
Just trying to be clever.
Oh - As to the instrumentation, I'm going by ear, but he's got a cello like you said (sampled in his studio and used on a mixer), his custom made guitar which has a sound like a Spanish guitar and is acoustic/electric, Peruvian handmade drums played like a tabla (by him of course), and the very distinct Chinese dulcimer (yan chi'in) which is in many DCD songs. I think there are also maraccas when the tempo shifts in the middle of the song and the vocals sounds like they were close-mic'd with possible AKG analog mics (used a lot from the 20s-50s because of their warm, "immediate" sound). I don't know any of this for sure, I'll have to see if he'll tell me on his forum or maybe some music site will have his setup.
All the writing, playing, recording, engineering, mixing, mastering, and production, as well as all vocals and lyrics -- in other words, everything -- was done by him at his studio in Quivvy Church. He uses Apple Mac Pros running Logic Studio to do all the post-production work.
He also took the pictures used for the CD booklet. The only thing he let someone else do was when he sent the master tapes out for CD replication and sales :-)
Last thing... I know he says "From dark earth to the light" on the CD. It's just that in most live performances I've seen on the web, even post-CD release, he says "sky" or "skies". It's a better choice anyway because he uses the word "light" several other times.
Brendan and Richard Butler (from Psych Furs) are both great lyricists but they tend to use some rhymes over and over. I guess that's why I chose "skies" here instead of the CD's "official" version, it just makes the lyric a tab better.
The ending could be stronger too, it was awkward when he was shaping the song during DCD's 2005 concert and it's changed here but not gotten any less awkward. But I can forgive some minor flaws for an otherwise great song!
It's hard to come up with the "oomph" line. Morrissey used to be able to do it in his sleep, now he's lucky to do it once or twice and album. I used to be better at it but now I try to avoid it and just let things end when they run out of ideas. But I've written my share of cheesy endings, awkward endings, and pretty good endings, so I know how hard it can be.
And, er, I don't play all those instruments, like he does... :-|
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