So here I sit, with a new EP full of six new tunes. Any regular readers of this blog will know how difficult the process of making a record can be when you’re trying to juggle work, home, other people’s schedules and your own sanity. With this in mind, to get anything to its finishing point is not to be sniffed at and is a genuine achievement.
The writing process for this record has been genuinely more enjoyable than ever before, largely because I hadn’t set myself any really solid targets to hit in terms of time scale. I also had given up on the idea of trying to write anything that was even slightly radio friendly and instead concentrate on some fairly delicate acoustic folk-pop tunes. The process did take a long time. ‘Make You Smile’ had been written almost three years ago and was the song that gave me the impetus to want to record a new set of songs. I always envisaged it to be the opener, but things change. I bought a half-capo, which, as the name suggests, covers half the guitar strings on my Taylor and had really enjoyed the different areas that that opened up for me. As often happens, the chorus melody came first and it was just a case of working out what the song was about. After it had percolated for a while I started to get ideas. At the time, me and my now, wife, were going through counselling before we got married as a kind of precaution. We both found this experience very helpful, however, I did tend to spend a lot of the time making rubbish jokes and mucking about to try to lighten up the mood a bit. There is a fuller explanation about this and all the songs on the record on the ‘Music’ section of my website http://www.ricneale.co.uk/
Next up was ‘What Would Be Left?’ and ‘Stop Holdin on’ both of which were written in the same couple of days along with another song ‘Halfway House’, which very nearly made it into the last line up of the EP but was deemed ‘not good enough’ by everyone. It will probably be available as a free download from the site at some point. I often have weeks like that – where I just write and write – it’s a good feeling to have a few tunes on the go at the same time and to just concentrate on them bit by bit – when you get bored (or stuck) on one you can just move on to the next. There were other songs from this week which didn’t even get as far as the band, but as always I will be stealing ideas from them for later tunes.
The title track ‘Someone Else’s home’ was written around this time although I don’t actually remember when. The chord progression and the concept (of comparing a house to a heart) had been kicking around since I was on honeymoon, but I don’t remember ever sitting down to finish it – evidently I did at some point or another. I really liked the title to this song which is why it ultimately became the title for the whole EP.
At this point I stopped writing thinking that I had enough tunes and we began to record. Some time ago I had the idea of recording a group of songs in a much more acoustic fashion to reflect the way that me and the band had been playing in the previous year or so. I had the initial idea of doing it very lo-fi, doing it at my house in a really organic way. This idea, as many other ideas do, failed. We even got as far as scheduling it in but people’s calendars didn’t add up so we had to change tack. We took the tunes that we had written into Diamond Studios in Wakefield with my friend and collaborator Will Richards. We decided to record in a different way than usual. Normally we would do drums then overdub everything bit by bit. We felt that this would take away any live feel that we had in rehearsal so we recorded with all four of us playing at the same time (me on guitar, Ivan on drums/percussion, Spence on bass and Stu on guitar) we would then overdub another live performance over the top (for example, me on mandolin, Ivan on cajon, Spence on glock and Stu on elec guitar) and put the two performances on top of one another. We really enjoyed this way of working, it gave us the opportunity to have multi-layered sounds, but did not take away from the live feel we wanted.
So now we had 5 tunes and a whole EP – or did we…? I had been asked to contribute a song to a project being put together by artist, Joe Simpson. The idea was that he would do twelve paintings that would tell a rough story, he would then give each painting to a different musician to write a song for. I started work on the song that would become the opening track of the EP “Dotted Line”. As soon as the feel and lyrics came together I knew that it would be a perfect addition to the record. Writing the lyrics to this tune was really hard, I had to try and cobble a story from a very small amount of information given to me by the picture itself. I thought that the character looked scared, but hopeful, so wrote a lyric that matched that mood. Being that we were going back into the studio I thought it might be worth writing another song to work on alongside and so “Pleading” was born. This song fits arguably better with the work on the previous two albums but thought that the performances were so great that it would fit on the EP. The song is much more vague in story and more complex in harmony than the other tunes but works almost entirely because of the live feel we managed to create. I asked my friend Missy Claughan to play cello on these two tracks and really enjoyed scoring out some counter melodies – I don’t think I’d done that since my big band days.
The songs were all mixed together, then mastered and we decided to ditch “Halfway House” as it threw the balance of the other songs out a bit. At some point along this process I started to think about artwork. I decided to ask my friend Ali Rowe to get involved; I knew I wanted the artwork to continue the ‘unfinished’ quality that we’d achieved in the music. We struck on the idea of the squiggly lines. Basically, each song has its own line and the front cover is the six lines all intersecting. I was well pleased with how it ended up.
The writing process for this record has been genuinely more enjoyable than ever before, largely because I hadn’t set myself any really solid targets to hit in terms of time scale. I also had given up on the idea of trying to write anything that was even slightly radio friendly and instead concentrate on some fairly delicate acoustic folk-pop tunes. The process did take a long time. ‘Make You Smile’ had been written almost three years ago and was the song that gave me the impetus to want to record a new set of songs. I always envisaged it to be the opener, but things change. I bought a half-capo, which, as the name suggests, covers half the guitar strings on my Taylor and had really enjoyed the different areas that that opened up for me. As often happens, the chorus melody came first and it was just a case of working out what the song was about. After it had percolated for a while I started to get ideas. At the time, me and my now, wife, were going through counselling before we got married as a kind of precaution. We both found this experience very helpful, however, I did tend to spend a lot of the time making rubbish jokes and mucking about to try to lighten up the mood a bit. There is a fuller explanation about this and all the songs on the record on the ‘Music’ section of my website http://www.ricneale.co.uk/
Next up was ‘What Would Be Left?’ and ‘Stop Holdin on’ both of which were written in the same couple of days along with another song ‘Halfway House’, which very nearly made it into the last line up of the EP but was deemed ‘not good enough’ by everyone. It will probably be available as a free download from the site at some point. I often have weeks like that – where I just write and write – it’s a good feeling to have a few tunes on the go at the same time and to just concentrate on them bit by bit – when you get bored (or stuck) on one you can just move on to the next. There were other songs from this week which didn’t even get as far as the band, but as always I will be stealing ideas from them for later tunes.
The title track ‘Someone Else’s home’ was written around this time although I don’t actually remember when. The chord progression and the concept (of comparing a house to a heart) had been kicking around since I was on honeymoon, but I don’t remember ever sitting down to finish it – evidently I did at some point or another. I really liked the title to this song which is why it ultimately became the title for the whole EP.
At this point I stopped writing thinking that I had enough tunes and we began to record. Some time ago I had the idea of recording a group of songs in a much more acoustic fashion to reflect the way that me and the band had been playing in the previous year or so. I had the initial idea of doing it very lo-fi, doing it at my house in a really organic way. This idea, as many other ideas do, failed. We even got as far as scheduling it in but people’s calendars didn’t add up so we had to change tack. We took the tunes that we had written into Diamond Studios in Wakefield with my friend and collaborator Will Richards. We decided to record in a different way than usual. Normally we would do drums then overdub everything bit by bit. We felt that this would take away any live feel that we had in rehearsal so we recorded with all four of us playing at the same time (me on guitar, Ivan on drums/percussion, Spence on bass and Stu on guitar) we would then overdub another live performance over the top (for example, me on mandolin, Ivan on cajon, Spence on glock and Stu on elec guitar) and put the two performances on top of one another. We really enjoyed this way of working, it gave us the opportunity to have multi-layered sounds, but did not take away from the live feel we wanted.
So now we had 5 tunes and a whole EP – or did we…? I had been asked to contribute a song to a project being put together by artist, Joe Simpson. The idea was that he would do twelve paintings that would tell a rough story, he would then give each painting to a different musician to write a song for. I started work on the song that would become the opening track of the EP “Dotted Line”. As soon as the feel and lyrics came together I knew that it would be a perfect addition to the record. Writing the lyrics to this tune was really hard, I had to try and cobble a story from a very small amount of information given to me by the picture itself. I thought that the character looked scared, but hopeful, so wrote a lyric that matched that mood. Being that we were going back into the studio I thought it might be worth writing another song to work on alongside and so “Pleading” was born. This song fits arguably better with the work on the previous two albums but thought that the performances were so great that it would fit on the EP. The song is much more vague in story and more complex in harmony than the other tunes but works almost entirely because of the live feel we managed to create. I asked my friend Missy Claughan to play cello on these two tracks and really enjoyed scoring out some counter melodies – I don’t think I’d done that since my big band days.
The songs were all mixed together, then mastered and we decided to ditch “Halfway House” as it threw the balance of the other songs out a bit. At some point along this process I started to think about artwork. I decided to ask my friend Ali Rowe to get involved; I knew I wanted the artwork to continue the ‘unfinished’ quality that we’d achieved in the music. We struck on the idea of the squiggly lines. Basically, each song has its own line and the front cover is the six lines all intersecting. I was well pleased with how it ended up.
This process all in all took about a year and a half and required the skills of a great many individuals. I genuinely hope that you enjoy the music that we’ve made for you.
