Victorious Combinations

 “Caught Up to You”                             How’s She know what’s going on in my head                             What did she mean by those words?                                 Was it the fight that made it alright or is it in all of us?                                                          You play with my emotions like it’s a joke that I care                              But me without my senses, there’s nobody there.                             ...

10 Mar 2008 Where Are You? Good afternoon, Well I was hoping to have a different song ready to upload this week, but I haven't been able to finish off either Bohemian Athenian or the final version of Please and we're quite a ways off on the other two songs still. (They're written just not recorded yet). So I've posted the almost completed version of Where Are You? . For those of you that have been following along, Yes this is the same song I put up back in November, so it's not really a debut, but rather a hint of things to come. As things currently stand I believe that Where Are You? shall be track four on the Disagreements ep, right before Please . Without that context it might seems rather downbeat compared to our other songs, however, in the flow it is a rather dramatic song and kind of makes sense with the other four songs. We've both been really busy these past few weeks and finding time to record the parts has been a ...

11 Feb 2008 Twist of Fate Good afternoon everyone. I was thinking of all the songs we'd posted on our page over the past year and it occurred to me that we've never once put up our song " Twist of Fate " on the myspace page. It's been on the Radio 3 site, and Last FM, but never on the myspace player. And, considering we still haven't finished any of our new songs, I thought if might be a nice little treat for anyone that hasn't heard it yet. This was a track we wrote around the earlier stage of the album, maybe the fourth or fifth idea to come to us, but we never really put a lot of pressure on it. It's a cool song with some interesting ambiance and a satisfying build. Mr. Ryan Dahle (Limblifter) provided us with some lovely ethereal guitars for the middle section of the song as well. I think the song came out of a piano improvisation I'd done earlier, and then brought out one night for Isabelle to hear. She'...

10 Dec 2007 Selling Music Hello, We just received a paypal payment of $6.37 from our music aggregator for sales on iTunes music store. I thought it was cool how we can see how our sales are doing each month through these services. It then occurred to me that most people don't realize how their money actually effects the independent artist and I thought I'd break it down in plain terms. In the old days, when there were still major labels signing bands to multimillion dollar deals, the artist almost never saw any proceeds from record sales. The deal was set up in such a way that only around 10% of the money accrued from record sales would be credited against the debt the band held with the record company. Courtney Love made a wonderful speech regarding this disparity and most of us are aware of it these days. Essentially, unless you were a million selling artist you were never going to be out of debt with the record company, they would always hold ...

25 Oct 2007 For the Glory Current mood: accomplished I was ever so shamelessly listening to our record again tonight and I heard For the Glory go by. It occurred to me that this was one of our biggest songs and I hadn't gone into an extensive blog about it yet. How absurd! Afterall there are probably more vocals on this song than any other on the album. It's got a fucking football chant in it at the ending for godsakes, how much bigger can you try to get! For the Glory was born as another song entirely. It was formerly known as All Awake Now , which had a strangely cryptic lyric that only made sense to me. The reason that song existed at all was due to Isabelle having a fashion show at the Vancouver Art Gallery and we wanted to play our own music for when her stuff came on the catwalk. All Awake Now had a good beat and a pretty cool vibe, and therefore became the likely candidate to use. This would be late summer, early September 2005. In ...

25 Sep 2007 The Story Behind Blue Kitchen Current mood: amused It's been a while since I've written about any of the songs so I thought today might be a good day to record the backstory behind Blue Kitchen . This song was the very first song that Isabelle and I wrote for our project. After the initial idea to write an album was born, a few weeks later we decended to the basement to see if we could write anything worthwhile. So armed with nothing but a concept, we booted up the G5 and sat down to write. Hmm.... I picked up a guitar and played a really silly riff: something like a Rage Against the Machine meets Extreme kind of riff - very ridiulous. However it did provide us with somehting to sing over and the first draft of Blue Kitchen was born. That initial draft had some very dodgy lyrics to it: I seem to recall my lines being sung in an incredibly awful psuedo bluesy manner, which, if anyone were to ever have heard it, probably would have ...

3 Aug 2007 King’s Cross Pt. 3 (last one, promise) Sorry I almost forgot to finish writing this, we've had a couple really fun nights this week and my brain is a bit fried right now. So there's not too much more to the story except for the last part of the song, the section where Isabelle's singing on her own to begin with: Take my hand etc. This was actually the very first part of the song that we had written, back in December. It begins with the big fade away which was to signify the explosion and then the quiet that would follow. Another scene shift and even more dramatics - one day maybe I'll get Steven Spielberg to direct teh music video! Too much Queen in my diet as a young boy I fear. Apologies to those of you that can't stomach such theatrical concepts, but here I was seeing the aftermath of the explosion in the tunnels: the dust and debris, the Tube carriage blown apart, the darkness and confusion: well, you get the idea. ...

1 Aug 2007 King’s Cross Part two Current mood: excited Hey, how's it going? Been a busy night but I thought I'd try to write the rest tonight. So basically the musical arrangement for this song was sorted for quite a while before we could put words to it. It sat on the hard drive for almost two months before inspiration took hold. When it happened though, it happened very quickly. Isabelle still owned The Block clothing store back then. She was out on a Friday night after work as she would do and I was home alone with a few glasses of wine messing around with the songs. I'd been recording guitars or vocals on other songs and then brought up "Ballerina" (still the working title). I played it through and was about to quit it again in frustration when I had a good idea. We'd begun another song called "Take my Hand" the summer before, wrote that one on the same day as the London Underground bombings by no coincidence. I ...

31 Jul 2007 King's Cross Hello folks, Our song has been getting some pretty good reviews on Garageband.com but I quite often see comments about the vocals in the first verse "sucking" or being shakey. That's lead me to believe I should give an explaination why I sang the parts the way I did and therefore expand on the full meaning behind the song. Initially I preferred the idea of not giving my exact story behind the lyrics as it would limit the ideas for a new listener, however this song is kind of important to me and therefore a full disclosure is in order. The basis for the music of this song began from a long rambling jam we started on Christmas Eve 2005. It was initially titled something clever like "U2" in reference to the guitar part with all the dotted 1/8th note delays (at the end of the final arrangement). It sat on the hard drive for almost two months before I could find a way to expand upon the initial ideas. E...

27 Jun 2007 All of the Love Current mood: mellow All of the Love Hello again, thought I'd post a slower song on the page as we've had the anthemic numbers up for quite a while now. As I've been rambling on about the process and reasons behind all the other songs I've posted, I thought I'd do the same for All of the Love. This was the centre of the album for a long long time. I considered it the best song, my most moving piece right up until I wrote Embrace (which came only after Isabelle and I considered the record complete). The original idea came out of an improvised piano idea, alone in the basement, just messing around, trying out sounds and plugins, attempting to come up with something that sounded real. I think I was obsessed with compression on pianos, the sound Sigur Ros makes so beautifully, so I'm pretty sure the virtual piano was smacked to death when I first played it. I put the improvisation away for a while until...

14 Jun 2007 All Together Addendum As I was messing around with the page layout last night I listened to the song a few more times and thought I'd clarify why there was a recorder in the final fade down. That was done on the very first night we wrote this song. We were clowning around and I brought my elementary school recorder out, (more a torture device than a musical instrument) and was determined to show Isabelle it could make a musical noise if you tried really, really hard. Well it would be a stretch to claim the results were all that musical but it certainly qualifies as noise. We were both laughing so bloody hard after I tried to play it we couldn't stop. That's why when the song begins you can hear the laughing: I'd restart the song as soon as it finished in attempt to come up with a better pass, or new idea, but we'd keep hearing that awful recorder at the end and burst out laughing once more. Silly I know, but it still mak...

12 Jun 2007 All Together The song I'm posting tonight is my guilty pleasure song on our album. It was written as a long winded jam out without any regard for simple form or conventional length. I know that sounds lame, but really after working on so many records for so many years and trying to fit all songs into a 3 minute window so they have a fighting chance of getting played on the radio, it's nice to write a song at 5 minutes and not give a fuck. We started this song really early in our writing process. It may have been the second song we started in fact. The guitar part (which Todd insists is "punky" but I never heard it as such) was about the best verson I could do at playing chords with attitude! I guess the crap way I played them makes them sound punky. Hmm.. oh well. Jesse drummed this song. I always wish he'd nailed the kick drum a bit harder which is why when the whole mess kicks in I triggerred a synth kick subt...

2 May 2007 The Hours part one I was inspired by a blog I wrote on the Pure site the other day. In that one I'd written the story behind our song Anna is a Speed Freak. It was a bit long winded but I've always felt it to be one of the most interesting recordings I'd ever made. The process of how we came up with The Hours isn't exactly as convoluted, but it still seemed a bit interesting so I thought I'd write about that song this week. Born originally on Christmas Eve 2005 and titled very clevery "Good at the End", The Hours was a very long jam, something around 8:30 minutes. It started weakly, went on forever and got kind of intersting at the 5 minute mark. We were using the "write way too much, for too long" formula to get our songs off the ground at that point. I confess that I still use this approach today, I figure it's better to play a song for obviously too long and hope to get a new idea somewhere la...