{"id":327,"date":"2010-09-20T15:38:41","date_gmt":"2010-09-20T22:38:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/?p=327"},"modified":"2010-09-20T15:38:41","modified_gmt":"2010-09-20T22:38:41","slug":"new-track-outbirds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/2010\/09\/20\/new-track-outbirds\/","title":{"rendered":"New track: Outbirds"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have another new track up! Outbirds is the first of the Sketchy Characters<\/i> songs to get a full studio treatment<\/a>. Please enjoy it here:<\/p>\n

<\/embed><a href=\"http:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.bandcamp.com\/track\/outbirds-2\">Outbirds by Crime and the Forces of Evil<\/a><\/noembed><\/object><\/p>\n<p>Outbirds is partly rage, and partly lament, and none of it&#8217;s happy; it&#8217;s for everybody who has been a friend of convenience one too many times. If you were there for people who then weren&#8217;t there for you; if you&#8217;re just a little too strange; if you&#8217;re just a little too real, or not real enough; if you&#8217;re just a little too <em>useful<\/em> &#8211; this song is for you. It was the first song I wrote where the lyrics came in a huge lump, with me writing them down as quickly as I could as they came falling out of my head in a rush. Usually words are the harder part; they come later, and sometimes with difficulty, but in this case it was the music which took all the time.<\/p>\n<p>You can compare the studio version with the earlier version &#8211; which for all its multitracking was very nearly a live recording &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.bandcamp.com\/track\/outbirds\">here<\/a>. Kathryn says the new one&#8217;s the album cut and the old one is me slamming back a fifth of Jack and staggering up to a mic. I kind of like that image, so I&#8217;m going to keep it.<\/p>\n<p>The most entertaining part of this song from a technical standpoint are the chimes between verses; they&#8217;re actually not chimes, they&#8217;re interference patterns between the left and right channels of out-of-phase fake-stereo output from a Radio Shack synth. The actual voice selected on the synth (what it&#8217;s &#8220;supposed&#8221; to sound like) sounds <em>nothing<\/em> like what I recorded, and is not nearly as interesting, either. I discovered this by accident when I plugged it into my board with a mono 1\/4&#8243; cable, thus merging left and right channels and cancelling out most of the signal &#8211; leaving <em>that<\/em>. Which I of course then <em>had to use<\/em>. It was <em>imperative<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Next up will be Stars, because after this one, we need something with hope in it, and this weekend I recorded the best bass line I&#8217;ve ever put down, and something about that kicked me in the ass vocally and I put down my best Stars <em>vocals<\/em>, too, the following day. You&#8217;ll like it. But first, enjoy something bitter. Clickie on &#8220;play&#8221; above, <a href=\"http:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\">or on the sample tracks list on the Crime and the Forces of Evil main website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have another new track up! Outbirds is the first of the Sketchy Characters songs to get a full studio treatment. Please enjoy it here: Outbirds by Crime and the Forces of Evil Outbirds is partly rage, and partly lament, and none of it&#8217;s happy; it&#8217;s for everybody who has been a friend of convenience [&#038;hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}