Welcome to my first ever blog entry. If you are reading this, thank you!
Here I am the night before the release of my first single “Close The Distance.” It definitely feels good to type those words and I am excited to have my debut track out in the world. I love the process of making music, so I thought the story of how this song came to be would make a good maiden voyage into the world of blogging.
My producer, Steve Maggiora (from Southern California band Robert Jon & The Wreck) has been super supportive of my musical endeavors from the start. Perhaps seeing something in me that I didn’t see in myself. Steve actually got me my first paid gig at The Wayfarer in Costa Mesa, California. It was a Sunday afternoon matinée and I had a forty-five minute slot at 5pm, where I played mostly original songs to an empty bar other than the sound girl, bar tenders, and one person at the bar who was watching football on the TVs and I don’t think even noticed I was on the stage. Nevertheless, it was a paid gig! I’ll never forget the feeling I had when the bar manager handed me a small brown envelope with “Artist” written on the outside and a bit of cash inside. It felt like real validation for my music and gave me such an incentive to keep going.
I wrote “Close The Distance” last summer after a vacation to Biarritz in the south of France. A beautiful beach town with a laid back attitude and that European sophistication. The chords and melody came while strumming a guitar on the couch at my Dads farm in England, and the words came over the course of the eleven hour flight back home to California.
Steve had been pushing me to record some of my original music for some time, and whilst out on a particularly lager soaked night in early January of this year for a mutual friends birthday, we agreed that we would get together to work on a couple of my demos, just to see where we could take it. A week later I showed up at his house with my guitar and three rough demos I’d recorded. “Close The Distance” was one of them and the one that we decided to work on first.
That afternoon was a bit of a revelation for me as far as my music and how it could sound. We tracked the acoustic guitar, I did a scratch vocal, and then Steve started doing his thing, using his keyboard to build the other elements of the song around my guitar and vocal track. I had quite a specific vision of how I wanted the song to sound. I saw it as a cinematic piece with lots of dynamics and emotion. Steve was completely in tune with that idea and by the end of the session we had what I felt was a great demo. I remember how excited I was on the drive home listening to what we had just made.
This was right before the world got turned upside down by a pandemic.
The demo was sent out to have drums, bass, lead guitar, and strings recorded remotely. But studios were shut down indefinitely, which made getting the final vocal challenging.
Steve sent me a mix of the song with the final instrument tracks added, but no vocal, which I used to rehearse with. Hoping that things would change soon and that I could get into a recording booth. After a while we realized that might not happen for a long time, so we decided I should just record the final vocal at Steve's house with his trusty SM7B. This extra time actually ended up being a good thing for the song as the melody developed quite a bit while I was rehearsing with the instrumental track. I finally laid down about five or six vocal takes and really put my heart and soul into the performance.
Once Steve had mixed the vocal into the track I then took that mix to a sound engineer (we wore masks and social distanced) to tweak a few parts and learn what I could about the whole mixing/mastering process. Everything was a huge learning curve for me and I wanted to gather as much knowledge as I could about the process of recording a song. Orlando, the sound engineer, is a wizard behind the board and I learned a lot during those sessions.
It took almost six months to complete the song recording, but it was finally finished. The first time I sat in front of studio speakers and listened to the final version of “Close The Distance” was truly a life changing moment for me. The song had turned out exactly as I’d hoped it would and I couldn’t wait for people to hear it. I also couldn’t wait to get started on the next one.
I’ll always remember the time I spent making my first single. Not because of the ups and downs of the recording process, but because of the state of the world at that time and what we were all going through. There isn’t a single person in the world that isn’t somehow affected by what is happening.
Making music is so trivial in the grand scheme of things. But for me, bringing this song to life has helped keep me occupied and focused on something other than the madness that is going on in the world. It has made the isolation that we are all going through bearable. Making music creates another world for me that I can get lost in for hours at a time. And for that I am forever grateful.
So who is the song about? Well, I’m a firm believer that once a musician releases a song, what it means to him or her is no longer important. It’s what it means to the listener that really matters. So if you have a spare four minutes and twenty-four seconds, please give “Close The Distance” a whirl and I hope that it takes you somewhere for a brief moment and stirs up some emotions. I know it has for me during the process of creating it.
Cheers.
David