Track 2: Blinking Lights (For You) (aiff)
The wedding march; the lock step double file line of the important personnel making their way to the altar. In many cultures, such a profession is done on horseback or even elephants. Though Jeffery & Ashley’s wedding was off the banks of the Mississippi, Mike and I liked the idea of leading the wedding party through the marching sound of horseback. For this, we selected a song called Blinking Lights (for you) by the Eels, which has a kinda clippity-cloppity percussion sound throughout. I arranged and rendered it differently on an acoustic guitar for the rhythm while Mike played the lead.
Of the recordings for the River Wedding album, and sorry for the spoiler alert, we both feel this one is one of our favorites end to end. It also features our favorite parts of the project. To explain, you have to know a little something about how we recorded these songs. The whole album was recorded using Ableton Live and Dropbox for file sharing. Most all the tracks were recorded individually and solo in either his or my apartment. Dropbox would then do its magic, so we both were up to date on each other’s progress. Once we had all the tracks, I began to master the recordings. At one point, for reasons we don’t know, Ableton Live started recording Mike with a nasty, out-of-sync time shift. Hearing this, Mike sought to fix the problem with his technical setup. Once it was resolved and recording on time, he realized liked syncopation that this recording error had made during the chord change in the song. So he went back, studied the broken recording, figured out how to play his part out of sync, and recorded it using his corrected setup—manually synthesizing the time delay himself. Personally, I love the breakout run Mike takes starting at second 44 while I stop playing and only tap out the beat on the face of a vintage Martin for 5 seconds. Yes, my favorite part of the whole project is where I stop playing guitar.
