blueNEWS Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7
The title track "Brave Angel" came to me in
a dream. It's fun to dream the band on stage. We get to wear clothes we could never
otherwise afford and we tend to make less mistakes. The lights came up and the band
was playing some dark and driving number. There I was front and center with a huge pair of
wings. My wingspan must have been 15 feet. I believe I was unintentionally tickling the
guitarists ass with my feathers. I think the whole thing was spawned from the artwork from
the first album. It's dark and has an angel that you can actually make out under bright
light. In the dream, a backdrop eventually unfolded revealing the very same angelic art
before the song wrapped up. When I awoke I wrote the song very quickly. In less than 20
minutes as I recall. It ended up having a similar story line to the Nick Cage and Meg Ryan
flick "City of Angels". When you peel away the onion skin you find the age old
thought "you don't know how good you've got it". The grass
is only greener on the other side when you don't water what you've got and push it aside.
An angel might wish to be a mortal just to see what it felt like to sleep comfortably on
her back.
In the studio we laid down an insane amount of guitar tracks on this song. They all
compliment eachother so well that it ended up being a stroke of genius rather than an
excersise in overkill. Manny played the synchopated power chords in the verse as well as
the solo and ominous feedback noises. I played the constant droning sound throughout the
verses and the ringing sound at the head of each measure. The tough task at hand now is to
decide what parts to play live. Obviously half of the guitar work has to be absent. On a
percussive note, we came up with an off-time break before the last chorus about a week
before tracking the album. Simple really, one measure of 5/4 in the form of a blistering
drum fill. Unfortunatly, after all the basic tracking was done and Kevins drums were
returned to his home, Kev and I noticed that his blistering drum fill was less than
energetic. he pleaded with Mark and I to find a way to inject some life into it in the
final mix down. We had no idea how time consuming that would be. We tried a series of
effects and ultimately settled on a flange (similar to what the "Electric Light
Orchestra" used on just about all their instruments all the time). I'm still not sure
if it blisters, but all the time spent flipping through programs on the Lexicon and
patching this to that and these to those like a 1920's switchboard operator with a bad
attitude seems to have paid off.
It made the title track because I was determined to remain in keeping with the same theme
as the first record. I never intended this disc to be a
departure from what we were doing the first time around. It should serve as an additional
collection of what we feel are our favorite songs. An extended demonstration of what the
band is about and what it can do. Maybe we should have called it "Blue Meridian
Too".
blueNEWS Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7