Claire Goss

Hold up. Wait a minute…

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Didja spot the omission? Probably not, you’re busy with your lives and everything. It’s my job to keep on top of this, not yours.

Turns out I forgot to post photos and a studio report for Flotsam & Jetsam, which has, at this point, been out for exactly 2 months, and was recorded in June. I’ve gone into the dangers of trying to recall details after the event before, but we’ll give this a go for posterity.

The first thing to note is that this song is nearly double the length of previous offerings. Practically, it did make things tricky. You can do half as many takes, and there’s twice as much work to be done in editing and mixing.

A few years ago strangeday did some work on this song. I’ve been keen to do something with it for a while now, as I’m quite pleased with the feel and lyrics. It transpired that Ally was available for this studio date, and I decided that we could go for Flotsam & Jetsam as he’d written the bassline. Aaron had written some splendid guitar parts for the strangeday version, so I asked him to come and reprise those as well as adding a fair bit to them.

The day progressed reasonably well. We tracked the drums in the live room, rather than in the studio room, to get a bigger feel. This did mean a slightly more involved set up process. We then got Ally’s bass parts down, followed by acoustic and electric from me. At this point, it was clear that the timeframes were slipping from what we’d hoped. By the time we moved on to vocals it was clear we weren’t going to fit Aaron’s guitar parts. He’d turned up, but was pretty sanguine about coming back another day.

We set aside another morning, which also turned out to be village day, and sporadically raining. I wasn’t able to be there the whole time, so I got to hear the final parts subsequently as Paul provided mixes. And I was well pleased!

I think that’s about all I have to say about that for now.

We’ll talk soon.

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Lyrics – Flotsam & jetsam

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Everything’s gone a bit out of sync, but as it turns out, that’s probably better. Usually I post lyrics for the next song either just before or just after going into the studio. Then it’s not so long a wait until the music follows. But this month’s song is a bit of a 7 minute beast, and we weren’t able to complete the recording portion until last Saturday. The editing and mixing are getting there I think, but there’s still a little bit of a wait to go.

But since you want to know, we went into the studio on 18 June to record a song that I’ve been looking forward to doing something with for a while, Flotsam & jetsam.

As with a few songs I’ve released recently, this was written around 2012. Unlike most songs I release this is something of a story. Imagine, if you will, a future where it starts raining. And just doesn’t stop. The song is written from the point of view of those living through that. It’s about dealing with the fallout where you didn’t plan ahead. Or believe that the worst could come to pass.

It’s probably equal parts metaphor and literal. I hope we don’t screw up the climate to the point where we look back and shake our heads at our greed and carelessness. I hope we don’t screw up civilisation to the point where we look back and shake our heads at our greed and carelessness. As a species we don’t have a particularly good record on either point. But I hope.

Musician-wise, I was able to scrounge up 3/4 of Roo’s Radio, but not a full complement. So Paul plays drums, Ally plays bass and Claire is singing lead vocals on the verses, which worked really nicely. A long time ago we toyed with this song as strangeday – and I’m not ruling out a strangeday version in the future – and Aaron was mucking about with some really nice atmospheric guitar. I couldn’t hear the song without this addition, so I duly enlisted his services.

And the results so far are sounding pretty huge. Given the number of partial plays for normal length songs, I don’t hold out huge hopes that it’s going to fare better, but we’re pretty pleased with it.

Here’s the lyrics for posterity and what not.

Flotsam & jetsam
Doesn’t seem so long ago
The sky turned black; the thunder rolled
And then the wind began to blow
And the heavens opened

We never thought to build to last
Nor dreamed that it could come to pass
Lowland turns to floodplain fast
It may be senseless hoping

Dull as dirt the rising tide
It’s perilous to step outside
Face the day, refuse to cry
Our bitterness but a token

But we sit and watch the waters rise
Turn and face the rain filled skies

Drag our feet, remember when
A summer’s day could feel like ten
There used to be a wound to mend
Now there’s nothing left unbroken

And now I sit on my back step
and watch the waters rise
And now I sit, head in hands
and watch the waters rise

How to make an album – ptII

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Well last week I reminisced about the week of recording for The Way Home. This week, I’d like to go a little into the detail of the time that went in to the project.

Around November 2014, I started thinking seriously about what I next wanted to achieve, musically speaking. The answer was fairly obviously a Roo’s Radio album. So I set about making it happen.

Initially I thought it might be me and Paul doing the bulk of the work, with the band filling in towards the end, but in fact, the others wanted to throw in behind the idea as much as I did. And I’m glad for that, as we have a far better end product because of it.

Not least because of what I’m about to tell you. Three extra people on the project meant a lot more working hours. Here then, is a rough breakdown of actual time that went into just the making of the music. Physical production and launch are a story for another time I think.

Album production hours

I’ve counted the total time of everyone involved, which in this case varied from just me (songwriting) to the band (four of us), to the band with producer, to a church choir (20ish). This is a very rough estimate, and I’ve erred on the side of conservative guesses to be honest. I’ve gone with 1 day = 8 hours.

The actual album process from start to release ran from January 2015 to November 2015, with some songs initially written as early as 2011.

• Initial songwriting 2011 – 2015. Approx. 2 hours per song, but I may have written up to 25-30 songs in that period. Some of these ended up with strangeday, some may still see the light of day, and some are probably just for me :P. Only 11 made it onto the album (the intro track was written during the process of producing the album and is a reworking of parts of two of the other songs with some extra bits)
~60 hours

• Extra band songwriting for 5 of those songs during band practices (2013-2014)
~96 hours

• Initial album planning (December 2014)
2-3 hours taking to Paul W about recording and the band about the project
~10.5 hours

• Building collaboration tool. 3-4 hours collating songs, influences, building an online wiki for collaboration
~4 hours

• Pre-recording band rewrites
Roughly every Wednesday evening between January and May 2015 plus one Saturday a month in the same period
~64 hours (evenings)
~128 hours (Saturdays)

• Working out final track selection and rough order/album journey/themes
~1.5 hours

• Final pre-production with Paul, May 2015
~20 hours

• Recording scratch tracks May 2015
~5 hours

• Studio week May 16-22 2015
~276 hours

• Choir recording June 2015 (inc prep) rough estimate
~43 hours

• Extra recording days July/August 2015 2-3 days with various people
~72 hours

• Cello writing/recording July 2015
~6 hours

• Mixing and editing June-October 2015 – officially 12 days, but estimating 22
~176 hours

• Band feedback on editing (very rough approx)
~12 hours

• Mastering
~26 hours

Total ~1000 hours or ~125 days
NB. This does not include artwork, physical production, design, launch planning or general low-level (casual) thinking about the songs/project management etc.

How to make an album – ptI

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It was a year and two days ago, on the 16th May 2015, that we started a full week’s work on The Way Home – the Roo’s Radio debut album. It marked the first time that I had worked full time, albeit for a week, on a music project.

In actual fact, what went into that album was so much more than just that one week, as I’ll tell you more about next time, but spending concentrated time doing a project like that is always going to stand out as a special time in your memory – good or bad.

Recording an album is an interesting business. There’s a lot of hard work, but also a lot of potential boredom: waiting your turn, setting things up, getting something wrong over and over again. There are high points and low points, but you’re always striving to ensure that the best bits make it onto the record.

Prior to going in to the studio I had recorded a bunch of the guide tracks. I believe I finished recording these on the morning of Saturday 16th, and we then did a bit of work on the guitar for Flicker. Already the exact sequence of events is fading from memory. Flicker was definitely the first song we worked on though.

Paul wasn’t around in the afternoon of the 16th so we did some final bits of writing and got some rest for the week ahead.

We’d booked in a drum day on the Monday, so we spent Sunday on Flicker and possibly another song we didn’t have drums on.

Monday morning was spent setting up the live room for the drums, and then Paul stormed through the drums for six songs in one day. The last song of the day was Dream Again. Paul had to leave for a gig or practice and was right up against it to get the song done, but true to form he smashed it out.

For the rest of the week we had to try and get through as much as possible. Generally speaking we had to get bass and guitar sorted before we did vocals, so we’d spend mornings doing the instruments and afternoons doing the vocals. None of the lead vocalists were drinking alcohol, milk or caffeine so there was an awful lot of herbal tea drunk that week. And lots of vocal warm-ups and vocalzone to look after our voices.

For fun we hooked up a live webcam during the week. We didn’t have a huge number of people checking in with it, but the footage (unfortunately without sound as we didn’t want to broadcast our numerous mistakes and dodgy conversations to the internets) was saved. We edited some of it into this video, but perhaps one day we’ll do more with it.

Most days we’d decide on a plan of action for the next day. We didn’t plan anything too far ahead and just went with how we were feeling.

We had a chart of things needing to be done and it became clear as the week went on that we weren’t going to make it through everything. We still had 2 days of time booked with Paul, so as the week went on we tried to find some more time where all five of us were available. One of those days was in July and the other in August.

The last afternoon/evening of the week saw us working on However. It was pretty emotional because it was the end of a great week. And However is quite an emotional song that means a lot to all of us, especially Claire. So she poured her heart and soul into that vocal, which was the last thing we recorded in that week. Every one of us shed a tear during that performance. Magic.

Then we decamped back to mine where everyone including El piled into wine and cheese, breaking our alcohol/dairy prohibition. And that weekend was the first NAGfest where we played a set.

[Edit: You can now read Part II]

What a week! Below is a fun infographic I made to show what went into the week. There’s quite a few in-jokes there, but I think you’ll be able to appreciate it.

Making an album infographic