{"id":43,"date":"2005-07-27T23:34:52","date_gmt":"2005-07-28T07:34:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregbueno.com\/wp\/meisakuki\/2005\/07\/27\/stuck\/"},"modified":"2005-07-27T23:34:52","modified_gmt":"2005-07-28T07:34:52","slug":"stuck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/2005\/07\/27\/stuck\/","title":{"rendered":"Stuck"},"content":{"rendered":"

After deciding “Faith in Religion” wasn’t going to be the right fit for Imprint<\/i>, I felt I had to fill the slot for which I made room. I don’t know if anyone still thinks in terms of side A and side B, because when I listen to CDs, I sure don’t make the distinction any more.
\n(Well, except for music dating back to a time when there were sides A and B.)
\nBut for some reason, I’m perceiving Imprint<\/i> as having two sides, and side A ends with “Take It Apart<\/a>“, which means the track following it has a difficult task — to feel like the beginning of a side B but still flowing seamlessly from the track before.
\n“Faith in Religion” at first seemed like it could do that, until the temperament of the song got in the way. So I had to start from scratch.
\nAnd I was at a loss.
\nI’m not sure what brought Sade’s “Paradise” to mind, but that song struck me for being incredibly minimalistic. The bass line doesn’t change at all throughout the song, and there are barely three chords to it. What’s remarkable about the song is how unremarkably it develops. It kind of starts, goes along, then fades.
\nI took away from that song the idea of a pedal tone. Two chords, one bass note — it’s been done before. Heck, I’ve done it before.
\nThe “Funky Drummer” beat I used in “Fatih in Religion” was still in my head, so I cut and paste it into a new file and changed a few notes to make it slightly more hip-hop.
\nI slowed the tempo to 90 bps, and I started playing. In about an hour, I had the harmonic rhythm for a new song. I’ve spent the last two days fleshing it out with a bass line.
\nNow I’m stuck.
\nThe chord structure and the melody of the song came out on their own. I’ve got a drum beat. And I don’t hear anything else.
\nWith other songs, I could intuit a guitar riff or a melodic embellishment. This new song is all infrastructure and no detail.
\nNot yet at least.
\nBut this is where it gets dangerous. I’ll throw the first bits and pieces together and get attached to them somehow, and soon enough, I’ll have arranged myself in a corner.
\nStill, I mixed down what I have so far to an MP3, stuck it in with the rest of the mix and felt it was doable — it didn’t feel too awkward sitting between “Take It Apart” and “Your Gaze<\/a>“.
\nSo the new sequence of Imprint<\/i> looks like this:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Promises\n
  2. Never Turn Back\n
  3. Silver Sting\n
  4. Our Best Wasn’t Enough\n
  5. TBD (jazz trio)\n
  6. Take It Apart\n
  7. TBD (paradise)\n
  8. Your Gaze\n
  9. Imprint\n
  10. Undone\n
  11. A Chance to Get It Right\n
  12. Love and Pride<\/ol>\n

    And with those additions, the total time of the album is approximately 44 minutes. Now that feels like a proper album.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The chord structure and the melody of the song came out on their own. I’ve got a drum beat. And I don’t hear anything else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s4Bkir-stuck","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}