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>> DAVID BOWIE :: HEATHEN - PART TWO
I decided to record our basic tracks on 16 track, 2" analog tape. There is no better sound than that. Every morning Matt and I would join David to learn what he had written in the early morning. David would play keyboards and I would play bass (we almost always recorded the rhythm tracks as a trio). We spent each day recording maybe two songs, at the most, tweaking the parts and experimenting with the form. No lyrics were yet written and often a song would have a working title like "Matt's Song" or "Jordan's Song," to commemorate the day of Matt and Jordan Rudess' arrivals. Like all previous albums I've recorded with David, we would record intensely, with no long breaks. Lunch at 1 p.m. would often be a 45-minute affair. Dinner was around 8:30 p.m. but we'd rarely work after that. This would be a 14-hour day for David that's a long time in the studio. I would go into the studio for an hour or so after dinner to back up files and do other important house work with Brandon. After Matt left us we transferred all the drums into Logic Audio, a software program that uses Pro Tools as hardware. I did some editing of Matt's drumming, but not very much. Matt is a really solid player. David and I were always going for feel rather than perfection. My philosophy is that if the feel is right, then that's perfection. We avoided the modern Pro Tools pitfall of making our music sound sterile.
After Matt David Torn joined us. Torn is one of the most versatile guitarists I've ever worked with. His rig is scary; he's got gadgets plugged into gadgets plugged into more gadgets! His guitars are all hot rods! He has recorded entire film scores with his guitar work. We recorded more than enough of his playing and then spent many days and nights editing the best bits. Torn took some of his recorded files home and did more magic to his loop stuff with his computer rig, the guitar sounds on "Sunday" in particular. After Torn left us Jordan Rudess of Dream Theater joined us. Ironically, despite the keyboard wizard he is, we used his talents mostly on acoustic piano and Hammond organ. David B. played a lot of keyboard work already on all the songs and Jordan's additional synthesizer work was obscuring some of the simplicity of David's parts. You can hear Jordan at his best on "Slip Away" and "5:15, the Angels Have Gone." Finally it was time to do some serious overdubbing by David and myself plus, of course, the vocals. I was suddenly impressed when David started playing electric guitar one day. I knew he played simple groove stuff like "Rebel, Rebel" before, but he was now more than competently wailing on some lead and sounding really awesome. It was a good idea to make the album this way, because David was much more present as a musician, on guitar, keyboards, sax and even the theremin. Recording his vocals was a joy. I set up the "Heroes" mic technique, capturing David's vocals from three microphones that only switch on when he sings loud enough. As Allaire has a very big room, the reverberation was wonderful! Soon after a lead vocal was completed (usually just two takes) David would often want to sing his back ups with me immediately afterwards. One of my passions is singing in a counter-tenor voice, or falsetto. My name, when I sing falsetto, is Shirley, because I copied the voice of Shirley in Shirley and Lee ("Let The Good Times Roll). On "Sunday" I got to sing in my newly acquired throat singing technique. That buzzy synth sound in the instrumental passage is actually me singing overtones.
One morning, after all the vocals were recorded, David called my room and asked if I had any relatives or friends living in downtown Manhattan. I could think of only my son Morgan. He told me that a plane had just hit one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. He had just seen it on television. I was actually on my porch practicing tai chi when David called, but I ran to his house to see the news (I didn't have a TV in my room). By then a second plane had just hit the other building and they were both seriously on fire. David turned to me and said, "This is no accident, we've been attacked!" I was sick with anger, fear and grief simultaneously. We spent the next half-hour trying to phone Manhattan, to see if our family members were okay. I think we managed to get one call in each. I managed to leave a message on my son's answering machine knowing at least that his building was standing. Then it was impossible to phone NYC. Unbelievably I found Morgan online! He was in a plane that was grounded in Detroit immediately after the attack and was using instant messaging to talk to his friends from his laptop. This is not the place to share my feelings about the attack and the aftermath, but we suddenly found ourselves in a very strange space, feeling so positive about this great music we were making; then this awful, awful thing happened! After a few days we called for our string quartet, the Scorchio quartet to see if they felt like recording. We had very little left to do. Of course, it was the best thing to do, to try doing something to make life seem normal again. They braved all the checkpoints out of the city crammed into violist Martha Mooke's car and arrived a little shaken but anxious to make music. I had already spent a few days writing scores for Scorchio and David and I had this wacky idea to give each string player in the quartet a guitar amp to play through. It all worked so well. We had a great day, a much-needed day. On the weekend of September 15th, we packed up and went back to our respective homes, to take a break and then to resume Heathen at Looking Glass Studios in Manhattan. ...........to be continued.
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