Victorious Combinations

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...

11 Feb 2007 Why We Need Other Artists Current mood: artistic It's almost pathetic how obtuse I can be sometimes. I was feeling a bit low this evening, even though the Canucks won their hockey game vs. the Thrashers, and we had a brilliant practice this afternoon. For external reasons, both Isabelle and I have been feeling a tiny bit drained of late and I was poking around on myspace (not necessarily the greatest form of self help) and came across a page with an absolutely beautiful song playing. It was almost a gospel song, or certainly came from that genre. It soothed my head a bit and I listened to it in it's entirety. As I was relaxing to the woman's voice (I couldn't find her name as it was a song on a record label's page and they weren't too clear with their credits) it occurred to me that I need to expand my horizons fairly frequently. In the past, well certainly over the last eighteen months, while we were writing and rec...

2 Jan 2007 Embrace Current mood: awake Hello and Happy New Year, I've taken down all the other songs from our page this week so everyone can hear Embrace. It is the best song on the record (well at least in my opinion) and I figured if everything else was gone, you could only focus on that one track. It came about when a close friend of ours was very sick and possibly could have died. I had waited through the week to find out what was going on and after three days of thinking my friend might die (fuck) I finally heard he was going to turn it around and heal. The emotions inside me came out in this song, all in one rush. I had turned on my mac and just played the repeating fifths on the piano, stopped, grabbed my phone and wallet and walked to the beer store near our house. On the way I made little voice memos with the chord progression and then lyric ideas into the mobile. On the return I figured out the chorus melody and lyric and had ...

12 Dec 2006 Video for Dafty Over the last week I've slowly been assembling a video for our song Dafty. It has been a lot of fun but also a fairly monumental undertaking. So far I must be a least 60 hours into it and I've only made it up to the break down. I believe I'm averaging just under one hour of editing per second of video time during the chorus sections. Crazy I know. I must add that I'm blown away with what you can achieve with home computer software. Isabelle bought a new iMac a month ago, and it came bundled with a humble little program called iMovie (which along with iPhoto, iTunes, iChat and our iMac makes a few too many things that start with a lower case "i" and end with a noun or verb in their title). Aside from Apple's penchant to brand all things with an "i", I will say how impressed I am with their software. I confess to being a Mac convert since 1993 so this ain't anything new ok? Howev...