Erin Lang Music

After another night of thunderstorms and doors and windows open to the evening slamming and waving, it is another sunny day and we are finishing up the details of ‘lightning’. It was much tricker that we thought in the end to turn our great creative static percussion idea into a suitable reality. We went so far in an dramatic acoustic direction with this song, grand piano and accordion, slide guitar and acoustic guitar layers, that it was really hard to place something so electronic as these very high frequency clicks and pops that seem to travel straight through the song leaving it in the background to attack your eardrums. We got so far as thinking we were really ruining the song with our clever idea and it was totally inappropriate but after a bit of time outside
debating the merits of martial arts and eastern philosophy and re-approaching the pattern a little bit, running it through a amp for a bit more air around it, it started to work. Bouncing the parts while watching the Bjork video for Triumph of a heart’ and Shakira ‘Hips dont lie’ put us in the mood for banana sandwiches and apfle shorle, well me and Ron anyway!

So then we open ‘You’re Better Off’ to add some more lovely cello parts that Paul (Van Dongen) recorded for us over the holiday season and that was perfect because this song really does have a snow globe coo coo clock kind of feel.
We recorded some pizzicato strings for the verses and ever since i wrote this song i have had it in my mind that though it is a sweet tragic song, musically the middle eight must be full of hope and joy and i pictured it like the big glorious endings to those 1940s musical films where there are hundreds of women synchronized swimmers with flower covered bathing caps on making the shapes of stars and concentric circles counter rotating, trapeze artist flying through the sky and fireworks….
but only for 8 bars and then back to the quiet sad song..
So.. this was a bit of a difficult sentiment to get across.. to interpret this musically.. hehe.. of course i only wanted to allude to it not have a orchestra and a 60 person choir or anything, at any rate i think the piano we did in the last block together with the harp Roger played in England last week and that we just added to the mix, work together to give me just enough of that fantasy happy ending felling and thank god for that because these guys around here are sick of hearing me go on about those swimmers!
on the way home we stopped by a weilheim street party type of event where the main street was closed off and filled with tables where people sat looking happy with their steins of beer and giant pretzels. Kids played in the tree lined small river that runs down the middle of the street and there were some great bavarian Leder Hosen to be seen!