Sunday, October 22, 2017

SONGS: #1 - Midnight Crisis - "Take Control"

"Take Control" is the first song on Heart Beatings, my first album with Midnight Crisis, which is my first album as a lead singer & songwriter, (along with LASE, of course)....and furthermore, it's the first complete-incomplete song idea I've every put together on my own (which LASE added to later).

So, there are a lot of firsts, there.

Oddly enough, that song came spontaneously, out of cluttered air, about four years ago. It was one of those rare nights (at the time) when I stayed in & chilled after at least a week of going out every night. I was sitting with my acoustic bass guitar, which I'd had for the better part of ten years, but had done nothing short of jack shit with...and I thought: let's try something this rhythmic riff idea that I got from the Sisters of Mercy's song "Ribbons" - really simple, but quite deliberate, and easy to put a melody and an attitude over. So I fucked around with it, rolled it, poled it, and marked it with an E...but then I had to go to the other part of this idea...which was to take the main riff to Janes Addiction's "Ain't No Right", and put THAT through the same battering process to change it JUST enough to sound like it might resemble something of its own. (I also wanted all of this this contextualized by some sort of Guns n' Roses "Rocket Queen" or Motley Crue  "Too Young To Fall In Love" sort of feel and swagger, if you will). Then, somehow, I came up with the bridge part, too, just via trial and error. 

It's not as if I was or am ANY kind of bass player, or guitar player, but I am able to teach myself how to play what I have on my head and show it to someone else...who can then take the main idea and add the punctuation - dot the Ts and cross the Is - make this bold, and italicize this, and add lots of colors & shades & cool shit to it, and make it a fucking SONG, ya know?

I digress...

Another really funny thing I did when I did the original demo of the song (which, like all of my song ideas, I made using GarageBand on my phone, and doing a LOT of swearing in the process) was....I banged out a sort of "machine-shop" percussion track on this metal stool of mine, kind-of like I'd imagine Cop Shoot Cop probably did once upon a time, and it gave it this really cool, unique special percussion effect. It's for the reason that I banged out a similar pattern on an iron skillet when we recorded the song for real, at LASE's house, and if you listen really closely, you can start hearing it, I think, after the chorus kicks in.

Lyrics? Hell, I don't know. I came up with the entire thing on the fly, lyric-wise, and kept 95% of it the way I wrote it that night. It was just something that took shape, in that spontaneous, stream-of-consciousness kind of way that songs (sometimes the best ones) often do. I after I'd gotten the musical skeleton down, I just listened to it, and, without thinking about it, started with, "Sometimes I think about you when I'm lost into the night...." (a little PJ Harvey and a little Only Ones - right in the first line, huh?). I mean, ANYONE from your girlfriend to your grandma wants to hear that, you know what I mean? But you have to say these things within the rhythmic context of the song, and hopefully wrap enough of a melody around it to make it palatable for anyone besides yourself, HAHAHAHAHA!!! It can be a bitch....but when it works, it works.

My favorite lyric? The last line in verse 1: "...every tear you cry paints a picture of my heartbreak."

The chorus? "Take control"...of what, exactly? Hell....I think I was just really singing about what the fuck I was doing, now that I think about it. I'd had a lot of song ideas in my head for years, some being better than others, and was frustrated that none of them were coming into fruition. So, without giving it a lot of thought, I finally grabbed myself by the breaches and got to work....and now, we finally have an album of it.

I digress....

Anyway, the lyrics took about 5 minutes to write, and I finished the demo around 6am or so, or in my world, bed time!

It's the coolest thing in the world for me to have made this a real, recorded song, with LASE's killer guitar madness, not to mention his top-fucking-notch production/engineering work, + Mike's brutal warrior drums whipping it mercilessly into shape.

Anyway, download a copy....or at LEAST stream it.

And thank you for listening.

Next song, next week.

Marty E.

"Nothin' matters but tonight and you and me..."

Stream/download "Take Control" on BandCamp

Download "Take Control" on CD Baby (or buy Heart Beatings CD)

Download "Take Control" on Apple iTunes

Download "Take Control" on Amazon

"Take Control" on Spotify

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