When the Trees Grew Back
The title song that kicked off the One Human Minute 60-song cycle a few weeks is a kind of intro, an opening statement, or thesis for the larger work. With song #2 things really get off and running as the protagonist goes out for a run but soon loses his way—literally and/ figuratively.
Summer On the Web
But then in song #3 he slows down, gives up and decides that it’s easier to live sedentarily and virtually on the web. As he (AKA, me) sings plaintively in this demented jazz ballad, “Birds flying by/As I tweet the hours away…”
The perils of redoing recordings from the past
When the Trees Grew Back and Summer on the Web are from the original set of one-minute songs I wrote about eight years ago. I recorded a full demo of the former three years later that still floats around SoundCloud. On the chorus of that demo is a synth part that I particularly liked. But that, and the opening three drum hits are, virtually all I kept from the original when I went back a re-recorded the tune.
Working from a completed and, for all intents and purposes, fully functioning demo made this track particularly difficult to record and mix, which is why it’s coming a week late. I felt the need to hold on to many of those old tracks because they just sat there, part of my own recorded history, and were part of the original inspiration—as if that lent them some kind of sacred status. The more I do this, the warier I am of the possibility that my original inspirations may be ill-conceived, and that maybe I was just having a bad day.
In any case, it was only after I gradually and somewhat reluctantly purged most of the original tracks that I was able to complete the mix you hear today. I was about to say “painfully”, but at my age, I enjoy throwing crap away—literally and figuratively.
