Memories From Two Different Brains

OK. We have to get this out of the way first... What I said to Tim was NOT that his song, "Don't Blink" had the ingredients to make a "nice little diddy." What I said was "this song is so f#$%^ing full of hooks it's at least 3 hit songs in one!!!!"

I mean, I hate to point out what turning 50 can do to one's memory. Clearly, one of us is remembering wrongly (hint - it's him).

So, the rest of what he says is right on the money. Tim and I had an iChat rehearsal a few weeks ago, which was a blast. We kicked ideas back and forth for "Don't Blink" and came up with a good approach. A couple nights later, I put my interpretation of what we talked about down in Logic and did a quick mix. My vocals were the couple of lines that Tim mentions, repeated over and over with some sort of humming and nonsense lyrics thrown in where there are none yet. I did three tracks - lead and a set of harmony backgrounds - and I gotta say they were absolute rubbish - out of tune, out of time, out of my league. But, thanks to todays modern tools, I was able to bend the recordings into tune and cut them up to make the timing right.

I did my best Beatle backgrounds and, perhaps, one day when the Anthology of this project comes out, you'll get to hear the demos.

I gave my take to Tim, who has been adding some stupendous drum parts. And most recently, he's shown me his "Wall Of Sound" remix with huge drums and bass. It's sounding great!

My tune, as Tim notes, is called "It's Girls." And I did complete the demo in one day - New Year's Day. But in all fairness, it was a song that I'd started WAAAY back in the late 1980s to sing with my then band Personal Effects. At the time, I had a couple of verses and a couple of choruses, and the music was completely different. For this demo, I rewrote the words and came up with an entirely new melody. I had a blast doing the demo, singing at the top of my lungs, and learning how to get those wonderful Liverpool sounds out of my guitar and bass.

The demo ends up sounding like BeatlesBeachboys-amatic - as if you tossed them into a blender and got a surfing on the Thames kind of sound.

So, the next step is for Tim to get off his duff and finish up some words. I've offered to have a lyric rehearsal so he could get some feedback in real time - a real John and Paul approach. I hope he takes me up on it.

Anyway, I think it's clear that we've got two giant hits on our hands. All we have to do is get to England, record and mix them in a day, get them out into the market, get some musicians to tour with, make a trillion dollars and fend off the groupies.

I am looking forward to the England part AND the trillion dollars. I have my own groupies at home...