Christopher Blog

14) Inside This Place (5:20)

Not available since 1999

Another reprieve from the negativity. It seems to ebb and flow with `Orchid.’ Unlike the previous song, I don’t get the feeling of bile rising up within me with `Inside This Place’ even though it is much more `desperate’ emotionally than `My Love.’ I remember that I wrote this song based on the drum beat from the ending of `My Love,’ except I sped it up. So, it stays true to the rules of the other 2 song cycles; borrowing from the previous song.

And just like the 2 other cycles, the third song is always palatable, yet yields some major discomfort for the author.

Aside from some rather daft shoe-horning of multi-syllabic words, I like this track.

The Pen Is Mightier Than….

The scribbling you hear in the background is me writing out lyrics of the song as I sing them.

“I thought about love, I thought about home” etc. I am writing the words in unison.

I wish I still had those pieces of paper because the scribbling is astonishingly messy. I could barely keep up with the words and keep in time with the phrasing. But it was worth the effort. It adds colour and character to a concept that’s getting bleaker by the minute.

I appropriated a drum sample from the Tapping the Vein song `Numb’ for this track. As you can tell, my sound library in 1999 was limited to whatever I could afford and local artists. But it worked.

Memories:

Drinking cold Cabernet in a bar with a cherry oak counter. Writing out the second draft of the lyrics.

Orchid Outtake: Inside This Place (Original Version)

I think this version isn’t too different from the final version I did. I think I re-recorded `Inside This Place’ to make it more hateful. That’s about it.

13) My Love 12:26

Not available since 1999

This song is an epic. An epic embarrassment. My scalp literally started itching when I put this on for the first time in years. A vile beacon of self-pity captured in 12 glorious minutes. The temptation to not post this song was very high. I think only 3 people would have noticed its omission and their silence could have been bought with a chocolate bar.

While the intention was to create a grand plodding opus devoted to rejected feelings, it’s a near-forgotten sentence that documents what a waffling tart I can be. Oh, how the wonderful memories flood in like a bout of food poisoning.

You know something is about to go horribly awry when you hear the sample and the drums start out of sync. This is the most visible example of me trying to synchronize sampling with music without a sampler on a 4-track cassette machine.

The lyrics are trite teenage angst. I sound like a fat kid with a black leather coat. On a maturity level, I probably was still just that.

For a song of this size and scope, we will need to go section by section. (continue reading…)