The Fun Returns to The Aluminum Album

This past weekend was a very productive and energizing one for Know Eye Inn Teem.

I had written some lyrics for an original KEIT song called "6AM," but had not finalized a melody. I keep a little digital recorder by my bed because sometimes as I am on the verge of sleep, tunes will come to me and I will hum them into the recorder or lose them forever. Unfortunately, the "6AM" tune fell victim to the "lost forever" phenomenon, so when Cerin arrived on Saturday, she was horrified to learn that her task was to help me make some words on a piece of paper into a real song, without much idea what it was supposed to sound like. Apparently my directions, along the lines of "it needs to sound angry," were not much to go on.

Indulge me as I take a tangent and wax philosophical for a moment. One of the best things about writing a novel in a one-month period, as I have done three times, is that you find yourself thinking in entirely new ways. You look at things differently, and interpret them differently. You surprise yourself with these new thought patterns. It is exhilerating.

The same is true for someone recording an album with no musical experience. Music has started to sound different to me than it did just a couple weeks ago. I appreciate things about songs that I didn't notice before. I have been learning how to approach a song to try to make it sound musical, which is a welcome challenge.

All this translates to Saturday being really exciting for me. Cerin played chords and from nothing, we teased out what "6AM" should sound like. It was not easy. For example, part-way through the process I was certain that Cerin had started playing a different chord during the chorus, and I liked the original chord better, but I couldn't remember what it sounded like, and Cerin insisted she was playing it exactly the same, and I couldn't find the spot in the recording to prove that I was right (probably because I was wrong, I admit, but we will never definitively know; isn't that convenient for me?). Also there were some problems with my lyrics having too many syllables in places. Also I can't carry a tune, so it was hard for me to articulate a melody, while being even harder for Cerin to make up chords and sing along at the same time.

Also, Cerin was not wild about my verse about the penguin. Some people just do not appreciate a good penguin reference in a song about getting up in the morning.

Amazingly, though, the end product was the outline of a real song! I can't get over this. We wrote a song. And it is awesome, if you ask me. Both Cerin and I have found it running through our heads afterwards. It is the kind of song, we decided, that you could imagine some annoying person singing out loud on the metro.

We have a guitar track, and over the next few days we will be adding percussion, vocals, and trombone. I cannot wait to hear the finished product.

Still riding on this high, KEIT tackled "Sunday Bloody Sunday" yesterday. This was a kick. We decided to record it live, rather than with separate tracks for each musician. This meant we all had to play together, which is really fun. The original attempts were laughable, which was reflected in the first few recordings, which contain a lot of laughing. Peter and I, doing vocals, had some struggles with timing, and Cerin and Mic had issues with an E-flat in the middle. No one could figure out when the song was supposed to end.

Worst of all, there were major problems with the drumming, which we were doing via keyboard. We couldn't hear the drumming well enough to stay with the beat, and we couldn't turn it up because then it overwhelmed the song. We tried a couple of fixes unsuccessfully, and then finally decided to scrap the keyboard drumming and revert to our old standby, Jennie Banging On A Pan Lid, and miraculously, it all came together without the drumming - all of a sudden, everyone was playing and singing the way we were supposed to. I should mention here that Brad made his KEIT debut on violin for this song, and he was fantastic - as Mic's girlfriend Summer put it when we forced her to listen to it afterward, the violin really makes the song sound Irish.

What was especially fun about the "Sunday Bloody Sunday" effort was that we got immediate gratification because there are no tracks to mix with a live recording, so when we finished rehearsal, the song was done, and we could listen to it and pat ourselves on the back. It is the first finished song for The Aluminum Album. The Teem is very proud.