Up Til Dawn (Or When D Wants To Date F Sharp)
I didn’t realize it was Valentine’s Day until I finally noticed all the heart-shaped decorations lying everywhere in our collective home, at the office, and in the studio. I even wondered, “What is this sudden love fest all about?” Yes, I lost a bit of my edge… Let’s blame my micro embolism meeting with my commercial disdain of the day for that 😉 Ain’t love supposed to be a daily affair? Anyway, some people around us were clearly in love as there were heart-shaped items pretty much everywhere. When the common toilet seats are covered with heart stickers of all shapes and forms, you have to pay respect where it’s due. It was, indeed, an impressive labor of love…
We are currently sketching the song “Up Til Dawn” in the studio, laying down some ideas. It might be a potential album opener, and for me, the 2 most significant tracks on a record are the first and last ones. The first one needs to offer hints of what the journey ahead is, it needs to invite you in, to welcome you in such an intimate way that it will incite you to make a first step on that invisible path, no matter where it might lead you. There’s always a significant exploratory introspection that goes with it and it requires a whole lot of faith since I know I won’t have any understanding of the album’s real nature until years later, as the sounds and words evolve on their own willing pace. I mostly see my role as a channeling messenger most of the time. I close my eyes and some flashes of the yet-to-be-unfolded voyage slowly appear as I let go of everything else around me. It’s more of an inner examination and a self-delving contemplation than an actual search for the proper notes to play. There’s no roadmap when you deeply dive into the most secretive and hidden places of your heart. It’s scary, to be honest. It can change everything you want to remain immutable. So when you start that trip on the inside, you have to be aware that the “reward” might be to see your whole life structure be entirely torn apart… And once it does, there’s no turning back.
After talking with the rest of the band about what I saw for that specific first song on the album, I went to lie down a little as I was still very tired from the previous 2 days of hospital tests. When I came back 2 hours later, the guys were laughing, which usually means 2 things; either they have not touched “it” and couldn’t wait for me to come back so they could ask me “What is it exactly you wanted to express?” or something along the lines of “We can’t wait for you to listen to this, we experienced something really special!” There’s rarely a third option, but it exists, and it resembles something like “Alex will crazily laugh once he learns what just happened!” This time, it was the third one. When Ben told me they had touched something incredibly deep and we went pretty far down the rabbit hole, I asked to hear it, of course. This is the blessing of working in our studio; the response to our creative let-go is quite immediate. Then Ben started laughing: “Well I will let Moose, the scholar of the band, explain.” I immediately knew the whole situation had to do with either the structural essence of songwriting or some other academic limitation he had been brainwashed with in university. Who goes to university to be a drummer anyway? I guess that’s a different topic altogether… 😉 So Moose, laughing as well, explained that the sketch of a song I wrote with Ben for “Up Til Dawn” was in a certain key and that he wanted to explore a complementary key and so on. Ben couldn’t stop laughing, trying to say that they spent 2 hours building a lot of loops and layers and dynamics on a key that actually does NOT match the song we are exploring. My initial answer was: “Oh, it might be super cool then.” I don’t care much about what others define as working or not, my ears and emotions will let me know. Well, it was NOT super cool. Ben was crying with laughter while Moose was trying to explain that D goes with F, but our song wasn’t in F, it was F Sharp and D doesn’t fit at all with it. His voice felt like Charlie Brown’s teacher at some point, and Ben knew it. We all ended up laughing when I said: “Well, Moose started being experimental, that’s the best news of the century! Let’s celebrate, as our academic deprogramming process is finally working… YES!!!!”
