Victorious Combinations

I've just spent the past week working on a new song called The Best Tonight .  It was built on the back of another song we wrote last year called Overtime .  Recently we'd cut a version of Overtime with Jordy Birch producing, and even though he pushed us to get a great vocal performance, after the glow of studio excitement faded the song just seemed to lacking something.  The recording was great but the song itself seemed to lack that little spark it needed to make it important. So, while I was attempting to "fix" the original song a new song started to appear from the work, a better song actually.   The Best Tonight is kind of a story song, our story.  It happened quite naturally, and was initially effortless to get down on tape.  However, like so many other tracks in our history, under the sober light of day I felt a bit uncomfortable with the very literal vibe to the lyrics and we set about trying to rewrite them.  It's taken all week but I thin...

We've just done a serious reworking on our latest single "Brotherhood."  This new version is the result of several months of listening and pondering, as well as absorbing the comments of several producer friends of ours.  I'd like to thank everyone who's helped us so much over the past many months in the creation of this song, it really means a lot to us.  So big thanks to Justin "Juice" Kadis for his guitar playing and arranging, Misty Reid on drums, and Stefan Sigerson, Jimmy Zee, Jason Corbett and Jordy Birch for their assistance /comments with the production. And, of course, the wonderful Robert Edmonds for the cover art! Cheers to you all! Hope you enjoy the song.  I think it's one of our best to date. Mark Brotherhood by Combine the Victorious

Brotherhood is a song that I started writing in response to a very dear friend taking his own life back in 2012.  Our friend Todd Simko , who I'd played in Pure with back in the nineties, and who later performed with Combine the Victorious for several shows in 2007 and 2008, left us in the spring of 2012.  His death created a disturbing wake of emotions that eventually found their way into this song. Back in January or February of 2013 I remember starting the core idea one afternoon and the song took shape quite rapidly.  The lyrics are personal but I tried to keep them open to interpretation rather than literal; it's been a sad realization that this kind of incident isn't as rare as it may seem.   The truth is all four of us: Juice, Misty, Isabelle and I were heavily affected by Todd's death, and it's been many months of processing.  We recorded this version back in the summer, on a beautiful day in Vancouver full of sunshine and laughs.  Misty is pl...

We were busy this past week.  Between mixing several songs for other local groups I managed to fit in a couple excellent sessions on our new song Brotherhood . Last weekend we tracked Misty on the drums, and the bedtracks still make me smile.  There are little subtle noises in the background which seems to bless this song with extra life.  I'd finished my bass part early in the week and then Juice added some expertly played hand percussion to give some polish to the song.  After that we put a guide guitar part down.  It was Juice's idea to track his guitars on two different sessions, the first time to simply capture what we were playing live, giving us a chance to listen back to the arrangement.  That was important because it allowed Isabelle and I to record our vocals to a backing track that had the full dynamics of the song.  One should never under-estimate how important the vibe needs to be before getting a keeper lead vocal.  Seems simple bu...