Swelling
* The instrument that plays around with the melody in the last chorus is a gangsa, it's a type of metallophone. It was in the first chorus for a while too, just playing along with the bass but it didn't sound right when it was fading in so we cut it.
* Before we had percussion we had layers of classical guitar filling the song out.
* At one point we had a fuzz effect on the gangsa melodies.
* In the first chorus we had another guitar layer tapping along with the bass melody but there were really too many guitar layers so it just didn't really work. We tried tapping the melody with both a clean and distorted tone.
* Up until the first chorus the guitar and bass were tuned to D-G-C-F-A-D then we tuned the top string down to C for the rest of the song so, C-G-C-F-A-D.
* Straight after the first chorus there was suppose to be a spoken word part that continued on to the second chorus, we did record it and it sounded okay but it wasn't anything too special. It was going to be low in the mix.
* I did want to put a layer of bowed guitar in the chorus but it would have made it seem like too much was going on.
* At one point near the end of recording, I thought of doing another vocal take over the last chorus but we decided against it. The lyrics would have been different over the already existing ones, they were going to be something like:
Beyond the stones in this sun-drenched place, you kiss so cruelly (#)
And all along it never was
I live in another world, but you live in the same one (#)
(#) An Echo & the Bunnymen reference. Direct quote from LS.
* One of our drummers (yes, we more or less have two - though only one played on this current album) likes to think of the lyrics as "You spoke in the afternoon" and "Certainly done nothing" instead of "You spoke in the open room" & "and they circle they've done nothing".
Just say it in a ridiculous voice and it'll make sense to you. * I can't remember the working title for this song, I will ask my friend and edit this if he can remember when I see him next during the week. Though I kinda have a hunch that it might have been "Harmonic Song" or "Harmonic Riff".
* One of the guitar leads was completely improvised.
* From memory, only when we finished the song I thought of adding the "Amongst the sea" part.
Rising
* At first I didn't think the lyrics would be inspired by any thing of John's, I wrote the first verse before I thought of LTROI or LTODD.
* This was the last song we did vocal tracking for, I wasn't sure if I could do it because it was so different to Swelling. We had a lot of trouble with the first verse; when we were doing it it seemed so easy to mess up an almost perfect take.
* These are the last lyrics I wrote for the album.
* For any Kiwis out there, I wrote the first verse and possibly part of the first chorus in ANZAC Park. It's on a hill that overlooks all of the city, the river and the surrounding hills, it was an icy cold and dreary looking morning.
* My friend & I have a sort of in-joke, we quote the line "Our roots are sinking" in a loud Scottish accent and then proceed to crack up laughing. I can't put on a Scott's accent very well though he can, anyway I don't know how the hell that came about but heh that's just us for you.
* For the first section of the song we had my amp in a mechanics pit with two (I think there were two) mics, it was covered with wooden boards and carpet. We thought it sounded great but then we took the amp out and realized it sounded better without being in there. It was there for a day and a bit, the stand that we used had mold in it from being down there and so did my amp, the wheels on it were of course sticky as well. After that we put the amp in the workshop next door to the shed.
* The working title for the song was "Blues Riff" or "Blues Song", Hayden came up with a similar bassline to what the first section has now and it was sort of Bluesy, Robin Trower-esque from memory.
* I improvised the first section of the song, I remember that Hayden did the guitar lead before it goes into the second section of the song because I was stumped. I think it is probably the best progression I've ever improvised. It's a mix of finger picking and hybrid picking, I think it is quite similar to The Cure's stuff from the Faith or Pornography era.
* It took me two days to come up with the last two lines for the last chorus.
* We recorded the bass and guitar parts at the same time for the ambient section at the end of the song.
* Both guitar melodies in the choruses were mostly improvised. I remember we thought the first few notes of the guitar melody in the first chorus were quite folky, it seemed to change the mood of the chorus.
* Rising was the first song we wrote for the album, we had written Absolution about a year before but we weren't too sure if we were going to record it.
* There are vocals over the leads in this song and "Utryddelse", it's sort of an unintentional parallel. At first we weren't sure if vocals over the leads in this song would really work.
* At one point we were thinking of keeping this song as an instrumental. Also to begin with we thought of having growled watery effect ridden vocals similar to the growls in "By the Pain I See in Others".
* After the first chorus, instead of actual palms meeting my bandmate used to think of palm trees.
* Using lots of vocal layers was quite a new thing to us. (See the choruses, there are many.)
* For this song the guitars only used tube overdrive from my preamp that Hayden built me:
* That's an older photo of the preamp before it had proper knobs.
Other
* All of the songs were recorded in a shed that had little to poor insulation, a lot of homes in my country are poorly insulated in general. It is difficult to say exactly how old the shed is but it must be at least a few decades old. We also recorded our first album in a shed though it was a metal shed.
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I'm sure I'll probably think of some things I've missed but that's all for now, I'll post the original unedited lyrics another night.
We put my amp in the small workshop next door to the shed. The shed is getting on in years but it's better than the one we used to record in, it's outside of the city. You can see the rug that covers the mechanic's pit in the shed that we put the amp in for a day or two.
