Our Cold Feet Re-Sing
Saturday, August 23rd, 2025 01:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudio |
82F, and sunny this afternoon, with a mild 60% humidity!
This past week was the first full week of classes and... not one single report of a bad locker combination.
Did I write in this blog about how it fell to me this summer to advance the combos for some 2000+ lockers in the building?
For the past 12 years, that had been done by a guy named Galan, who retired back in the spring.
He was routinely given six weeks to get the task done, but this year, because of huge drywall projects and other BS, they gave it to me in late June, and I had only four weeks!.. to do this thing I'd never done before!
Without getting into all the details, it was normal for there to be twenty to thirty lockers, in the first few days of the school year, that wouldn't open.
The expectation was that with me as a newbie doing it, with less time than Galen normally had, that might be forty to fifty!
I was employing a methodology to the task that made me confident there would be no more missed locks than on Galan's watch, and possibly a few less, but I did expect to be running around this past week, re-jiggering a certain number of locks.
However, the number of lost locks was ZERO!
Now, the student population has gone down quite a bit since it's peak in the 2000s, which means that there are more lockers now, than students.
So, it's not that I had zero errors... but I brought the error rate so low that it was undetectable!
In other words, there may be a few missed combos out there, but they all happen to be on unassigned lockers!
At any rate, this made me look good, going into my second school year at PVHS.
And it was a milder week in the 80sF too, so that was nice!
Just back from today's vocal session in Studio C.
Today was a full re-sing of, Our Cold Feet, and it went well!
It's a short song... only two minutes worth of vocals, with the final minute being an instrumental outro.
So I was able to get eleven full takes, which were a combination of some sung straight through, and others going verse by verse to make sure things were right.
And I still had half an hour left at the end, so I booted up, Magic Monday, which has already been comped, and sung two full takes, for patching material.
The first comp of Magic Monday was pretty good, but there were a few isolated spots where I didn't like the execution of a word.
So this is good! Re-sings are done now, and I've gotten a start on patching, with one Saturday left to go in August!
I'm also just happy that I've made it through three of the four full work weeks of August, and now there's only one left... with Labor Day weekend waiting at the end of it!
This time next Saturday, I'll be able to say I didn't miss a single week of vocal sessions through all of June, July, and August!
So, I'll have followed through on the, "summer project," I set for myself last May.
Of course, there will still be harmonies to record through September into early October, but it'll be a different vibe, knowing that the main vocals are all in the can, and summer's heat is a bad memory.
This was a song composed in, I think, the fall of 1995.
The oddball, jazzish chord progression was just an experiment that started with a weird little lick, involving very dissonant, 2nd, chords, that stuck with me over those weeks, and was slowly expanded into two minutes worth of music that had no clear bridge or chorus.
I worked up a melody for what I had, and I liked it, but was stumped for where to take the song, bridgewise.
The scratch lyrics I came up with were based on experiences of the day, being stood up for dates, which happened a time or two, though I can't recall that it was about any one girl specifically.
thinking in circles again
I say
eyes of brown
brown of bark
the breeze of trees
[two empty measures]
breath of life
living eyes
eyes of brown, a captive
SOS
911!
here it comes again
I'm staying up until
tomorrow comes to take
tonight away
out from under
our cold feet
today had left to give
tonight a chance
but I called, yes I called
and she would not
turn off
the machine
a mistake, three days in the making
three nights nonstop heart breaking
all a big mistake
oh well
oh well
I'm staying up until
tomorrow comes to take
tonight away
out from under
our cold feet
a mistake three days in the making
three nights nonstop heart breaking
all a big mistake
oh well
oh well
oh well
oh WELL!
[music ends, tambourine counts empty measures, builds back to full instrumental outro with horn playing the melody line]
I considered the lyrics to be a bit silly, though I did like the, "tomorrow comes to take tonight away," part, and meant to keep that.
But the song stuck in my head, and I found myself singing it in the car, with a total Morrissey voice, and would laugh about it, so I recorded the Morrissey version, which was a lot of fun.
But then I moved on to other songs, and forgot about it.
The next spring I finally had my Fostex 4-track, and it was time to focus on re-recording a list of more developed songs, and that tape with Our Cold Feet just never got re-visited until last September!
I was so happy to hear that old Morrissey version of, Our Cold Feet again, after 30 years, that I knew it had to go on the album!
But I still did make attempts to re-write the lyrics, to no avail.
Back in April, I sung the original lyrics, but I was still trying to sing it straight, in my own voice.
The result, after comping, was dead on arrival, for a few reasons; 1) My voice just wasn't back yet, 2) I wasn't very focused on it... recording it as an afterthought, at the end of the same session I'd recorded the first version of, Reavis 309, and 3) it was about a half-step too low, making the low parts hard to hit very soundly.
I bumped the music up a half-step, a few weeks back, after comping the first version and listening to the resulting dumpster fire.
And then last night, I tweaked the drums, adding that second snare sound, and worked a bit on the instrumental part, just to get into the groove of the song.
Then today, I gave it the full session, and sung all 11 takes in full Morrissey mode!
So, I think the final result will be as fun as the original lark from 1995, but with full drums, guitars, and strings that weren't available to me back in those days.
Okay, that's the Saturday report!
Time to get back to comping!
Clue Phone didn't get done last week because of the building checks last Sunday, that kinda ruined my mood.
°¦}
