Recording our songs at the Rainbow Farm Cottage
Silken love, we’re together, all the frames above
We have overcome, stormy weather
Silken love, feel your presence flowing in the breeze
Watch your presence dancing through the trees
Rebecca and I took some time off to work on recording a couple of tunes that had been circulating in our minds for some time now. In the recent year, we had been investing in some microphones, so we can set up our own mobile studio. We were generously offered to use the Rainbow Farm Cottage by a dear friend of Rebecca, Isabelle. So away from the daily distractions, we can finally focus on bringing the musical ideas to fruition.
How does our songwriting work? Well, every time I pick up my guitar, l will record it, either with a simple handheld recorder, or properly mic’d up. Or if Rebecca joins in, just to jam a bit… Then I set up all the big tube condenser mics… resulting in many hours of recordings. Quite often, these recordings contain some passages that have a song in them. Sometimes even, completed songs are pulled out of thin air, and present themselves through our instruments… much to our surprise.
After diligently collecting the little gems from all these recordings, I create folders to put on our music players, so we can listen to them while traveling for example. Listening to the raw ideas like this on several occasions, they start to talk to me somehow. If there wasn’t a melody for singing yet, it might just pop up while driving in the bus from Brussels to Amsterdam. Or while walking in the countryside, talking to each other, suddenly one right sentence pops up that unlocks the rest of the song, and the complete lyrics write themselves. But also we have sessions where Rebecca and I take one raw idea, one nut that was hard to crack, and we give it a listen again, and Rebecca goes off to be alone in a room with a sheet of musical notation paper and more or less forces the music to make itself known. After some minutes, she will come back and present to me what had been written. Usually on hearing it, it immediately triggers some related ideas… and that’s how that song is unlocked then.
Writing lyrics is another mysterious process, you never know how it comes about. As I said before, it can be that one sentence, or just a word combination that pops up, and the rest of the words almost write themselves. Another day, I can be staring at a blank piece of paper and nothing comes up. Or I end up writing in a way that has nothing to do with spontaneous creation… it becomes too forced. These lyrics never really sit well in the song. And because it doesn’t feel good, we don’t sing the song, and it doesn’t become a part of us, yet. Because sometimes the song starts to work beautifully after we have rewritten the lyrics. Or we have changed the key, from G to D. Or changed the rhythm just a tiny bit. One thing is clear, if the song adjusted itself, we can just feel it. Yes, it’s there!
Another thing we encounter while recording our music is the difficulty to recreate the specific musical depth that we sense in the spontaneously arising ‘instant compositions’ we record, when we are not specifically recording anything. When we are jamming so to say. I do not fully understand this process, but if musicians jam together, and they lock into the groove, a special kind of magic happens. A synergetic lift off occurs, elevating the musician to a plateau where they do not play themselves, but they are being played. If you listen to recordings of these occurrences, you find that every note just falls magically into the right place… It’s actually kind of impossible to describe what I feel when I hear this music. A song can be a nice song, but a synergy composition bathes the senses in a different way. So, we sometimes use the original recordings from the spontaneous compositions and do some overdubs. We write lyrics for them, and maybe layer some sounds on top of them. In this way, we can share some of our magic music moments with others.
Mike
