Away

This one is a funny one. This song took shape in mid 2009, and came together pretty quickly and easily.

However, somehow I nearly forgot about this song. As luck would have it, right about the same time I started going through my archive of recordings parsing out what songs I had to work with in the Spring of 2022, I actually had a Facebook memory pop up that said on that day in 2009 I had posted something along the lines of “Recorded a progressive metal song today”, and it took me a moment to go….wait, what song?? 2009? So I started digging through my 2009 recordings folder, and all it’s nested subfolders, and there it was. I had initially passed over the folder because it was only titled with the date, and not the song name.

A little insight into my organizational madness is necessary here… I typically archive my recordings by year. However, when starting a new recording, I usually make a folder that’s just the date (in YYYY-MM-DD format so it’s chronological when sorted by name) if it’s just a new idea or something like that. If it develops into something I feel is usable and more than just a passing idea, I’ll usually update the folder name to include the title, or at least a description of the piece. So I have a bunch of folders that are just dates, but then a select few that may say something like “2009-04-11 Bm clean song idea” or “2009-05-17 Away”, etc. However, in this case the “2009-05-17” folder was just the date, although it actually contained a basically complete demo of the song “Away”.

That’s not to say that this song would have slipped through the cracks, but it MAY have. Which is unlike me, but I guess for once fate was on my side to have me relocate this one a little sooner. I most certainly would find myself scouring deeper into my archives to find the right songs for the album, but this one made itself known in a different way than the others!

Another part of the reason I say it MAY have slipped through the cracks, is that it came together really fast, and also at a time when my songs/demos didn’t really have an outlet per se. Most of my musical attention at this time was dedicated to Angel Vivaldi, and Reinvision as it was known at the time, was sort of on the back burner. So ultimately this was a quick one and done recording, and that was it. It didn’t really have the time to enter into my psyche as one of my completed songs, like the other lingering tunes included here like “Under The Knife”, etc.

By fast, I mean that the initial folder was titled May 17th, 2009 as I stated. All of the recorded files are on May 18th and 19th. The lyrics are titled May 19th. So ultimately it all came together in about 2 days.

Interestingly, I recorded all of this to a click, there was no drum track on my original demo. I added the drums in 2022, and unlike my experience with “43rd & Lexington”, everything synced up well enough for a demo, even if not perfectly all around. This is probably another reason that it sat in the shadows… you know, my love of drum programming!!

I continued revisiting this for inclusion here with “Hindsight” in May of 2022. Aside from the aforementioned drums, as with the other demos, there wasn’t much needed. I had the parts, arrangement, etc., all completed. I just re-EQ’d the guitars, which actually didn’t need much, and that was it.

Since this song was such a flash in the pan, I actually don’t remember too much about the inspiration behind it or the recording of the demo.

Also very worthy of note, the image above for this writeup is the first sneak peek of the booklet for this album. Special thanks to Gabriela Valceanu for her tremendous work (some of which is still in progress). I can’t wait until I can release and share all of it with you all!!

Demos & Gear

One of the reasons that this song came together pretty fast was that by 2009, I had my go to “demo” setup and approach pretty streamlined. I had presets on my Rocktron Chameleon dialed in pretty good for clean, rhythm, and lead tones, as well as occasional bass tones. This made it so that if I did have an idea, I didn’t have to spend much time futzing around to get good tones. The earlier demos of the other songs helped me realize that it was necessary to do this.

So on this demo track, the guitars are all my Ibanez Universe through my Chameleon, and the bass is again my Carvin 6 string fretless. As such when it came time to incorporate this into the 2022 Hindsight demos, very little was necessary in terms of adjustments.