Monkey68
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10/25/2007 8:40:04 PM
---- Updated 10/25/2007 8:42:31 PM
Looking Down - Reflections on the song
So, I'm going to take a minute here, not to detail every last blow by blow of the recording of the track - I'm not obsessive enough to remember each step and not impressed enough with my skills to think there's anything special going on in the recording.
I will, however, speak of the art of this song.
Looking Down
Patrick, drummer with the live Monkey68 crew (coming soon to a venue in the New London area), dropped me an e-mail a while back saying that he'd got a lyric stuck in his head - "She's looking at me with eyes I've never seen before" - but that he thought a song-writer might be able to do more with it than he could. Guess he thought that was me!
So I started playing with it - first of all kicking around that line - changing the "with" to "through" and, very quickly, an image began to form of the look that was in her eyes (whoever she is). Distance, I thought, she's looking through because she's looking through me.
When I attended Strozzi Ranch in 2005, I spent some of an afternoon on a hillside, watching eagles flying above the hill on the other side of the valley. For a while, I let my mind and body drift with them, standing tall, trying to match my arm and shoulder movements to those of their wings, flowing with them, left to right and back again as they circled the hillside. A very calming experience.
So I had her looking through eyes, through me, staring at eagles in the distance and the image, much as my time at Strozzi, was a confirmation of hope, of commitment, of opportunity. But all of a sudden (and I mean SUDDEN) an image flashed through my mind - it just did it again as I was finishing the previous sentence - and the sense was as palpable as being punched in the gut.
Where she stands, her toes curled downwards over the lip of the ledge at the top of a tall building.
This woman, staring at the eagles, yearning for freedom, ready to step off the building. "And I'm willing to bet my arm, that she'll do it, yes she'll do it"
I suddenly had this dilemma, this strong sense of a story at play - stories float around us all the time, we just have to be open channels - and I started listening. She's looking out, she's looking down, over this failing town. "Far below, the city is full of ants and centipedes, rushing to fill the day, with inconsequence and dismay". Futility.
And later, she reaches the point of decision - "Will she fly? Will she soar? Or will she sink like a stone, crushed on the bathroom floor?"
And it becomes very, very much darker. The images have been in her, she's locked in the bathroom - suicide?
I had planned to play an uplifting solo after the middle8 but wanted a New York soundscape underneath - I didn't have one, so went about getting random FX and layering them up - with the atmospheric synth pad running underneath, it began to grow its own drama - the FX are randomly placed (all except the dog barking) but seem to blend together naturally. The last thing it needed was a solo. The lift back into the chorus eases in, and the song ends on that poignant descending chordal run. The camera has zoomed in; we've gone from standing on mountains watching eagles, to a tiny collapse in a bathroom - all in the space of a couple of minutes.
As I worked at this song (the chords and melody came very, very early) I really wanted it to be ambiguous, that you could hear it both ways, but as it ended up the story is pretty clear to me. GLW (Good Lady Wife) even described it as depressing on first listen (partly because my rough vocals were recorded through a sinus infection and sounded bloody rough) - there's definitely an emotional thread to the lyric and mood that hooks me every time.
But as I've listened to it, I wonder if it is so bleak? I wonder if it's the same woman, or three different women? I wonder if this is a song of freedom that is within grasp but not taken? I wonder if
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