Song writing in Only Anything was usually a personal endeavor. Jon or I would come up with a song--usually nearly complete--bring it to practice and teach it to each other and the other band members. Jon was exceptionally meticulous about this process and would often draw up music including tablature and chords for the different parts in the song. He would spend a lot of time teaching me these guitar parts and was always patient, as I was typically slow to pick them up. Usually he'd leave some section of the song open where I could rock a solo free-style. I always liked those parts.
My songwriting/sharing process was similar. Though, usually I would usually leave it up to Jon to come up with his own parts for my songs. They were always good and usually made the song all that much better.
We didn't often write songs together. But we probably should have. Our one true collaboration came on a song written and recorded for the Space Capers album called Vader.
Vader started out as two quite different sections, each with their own words, that we stuck together. My section was the first driving riff that runs through the first half of the song, and Jon's comes in near the end as a kind of reflective response to the first section.
Though, as I mention, each section originally had its own lyrics, my lyrics were explicitly about Darth Vader--written in the first person as if Vader were actually singing them. I don't think Jon's words were about Darth Vader, and were eventually dropped.
I remember recording the vocal track for the song. I used several guitar effects pedals to alter the sound of my voice--while I didn't want to sound like James Earl Jones's Vader, but I did want the vocal to sound machine-y. I used a a flange pedal to give it that other-worldliness, and then a delay pedal to give it a funky echo. I love how it turned out.
Check it: Vader (oh, and don't you love the sound clip from Empire? I love how the feedback starts right when ol' Darth says "But you're not a Jedi yet." Classic.)
--Stone
1 comment:
good thing we went with the Stone lyric, mine were pretty forgettable. This song came together well, it's one of our strongest and best live I think. Fun to rock out on. I get a kick out of the sheet music/performance notes. On Paper Doll-"soloistic improvisation" and on Omar the footnote about the D/F# with a 6 and a 9 being a jumble of notes too obscure to classify! Sometimes you just have to add a mess of notes together and it sounds good. Sometimes you put together a mess of notes and it sounds bad but it's good to sound bad sometimes, know what I mean? Life isn't always pretty. So Jon, we should collaborate again sometime. See if you can do anything with this line: "I pay my bills with monopoly money,
The people don't laugh but I think it's funny".
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