Lazy Cat Media

The story behind a song: Lighter Than Air (Dominique)

20 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment

by annfeld
in Uncategorized

I ordered Everything in Between: The Story of Ellipse for my husband for Christmas. The DVD had been sitting in my Amazon cart ever since Christmas last year and I meant to get it for him then but didn’t. My husband and I are both big Imogen Heap fans so I figured he’d like it. And it was really awesome to watch this DVD because I LOVE seeing the behind the scenes of creating a song. I know I had this illusion when I first started recording songs that I’d go into my little recording studio (first my bedroom with just my four-track, then my apartment living room with a cheap microphone and GarageBand) and two hours later, I’d come out with a perfect song after only one take.

Boy was I wrong.

I really enjoyed seeing Imogen working on her songs: figuring out how to sing lines, working out arrangements and melodies, and of course, seeing her recording in her home studio. Of course her studio is a LOT more fancy than mine! I like seeing all that goes into making a song and seeing how someone else does it. It shows me that I’m not the only one who takes a while to record and perfect a song.

She mentioned a song called “Tidal” that really gave her problems. Throughout the hour and a half long documentary, Imogen talked about how she changed the arrangement for that song several times, not to mention melodies and lyrics. Eventually she got to the version that she released on her album, but over the course of the two or so years that she took to record her album, that song gave her the most amount of trouble.

And do I know how she feels. One of my own songs gave me such problems.

In one of my earlier video blogs, I played a French song based on a French novel called Dominique by Eugène Fromentin. The song was called “Madeleine” and was written about Dominique’s (unrequited) love for his best friend’s cousin Madeleine. Well, there was another song I wrote about that novel, this time in English. I called it Lighter Than Air and it was told through the point of view of the title character remembering his childhood.

First this song had different lyrics that were quite frankly more difficult to sing. It was the mixture of consonants right up against each other that didn’t flow together well. The melody also didn’t work. I kept trying for higher notes and instead of sounding confident, I sounded more like I was reaching for them in an effort to show off. A way of saying “look at me, I can hit a B an octave above middle C! And I couldn’t do that before I took voice lessons!” Overall, it just didn’t work. I had obviously art rock lyrics (telling the story of an obscure novel) over poppy music complete with a melody that went all over the place and didn’t have a proper hook.

I didn’t want to leave the song to languish in the depths of my hard drive never to see the light of day again. The story I was telling in the song was promising, it probably just needed to be massaged around a little bit.

So I decided to completely redo the arrangement.

I deleted all the tracks for this song that I already recorded. Vocals both background and main, gone. Piano part, gone. Drums, gone. All that remained were the cricket sounds I put in for the introduction. I didn’t delete the original lyrics, but I shortened lines, changed how I said things, and also retooled the melody. And it sounds much better now. It’s easier to sing and the melody flows much better.

As I rewrote the lyrics, I made extra sure that the lyrics not only flowed from verse to verse as I told the story of Dominique remembering his childhood in the countryside, but also I made sure that I didn’t have too many words that would be crammed together into too little space. So I took to speaking each line out loud to see how they flowed together. Do I have words with too many consonants? Does this word have too many strange vowel sounds that would be harder to sing on a particular note? I took great care with the rewritten lyrics and I love them so much better!

So here it is in piano form. It’s still not one of my most favorite songs, but I like it much better than before.