Ben's BLOG

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So sorry for the delay on the latest installment of Album InSite. I have no excuses, please forgive me.

Anyhoo, here's a few words about "No Matter What Song Is On."

I wrote "No Matter What Song Is On," in the spring of 2000, which was right around the time I started to hit my stride with writing songs. I was finishing tunes at a rapid pace, and the finished products were exactly as I wished them to end up. "No Matter" was my follow-up to "Breakdown," and I had a very strong interest to try stringing together song titles into a tune of their own. I set out to try to tell the story using as many titles as possible.

Some references are fairly blatant, such as those for James Taylor, Joni Mitchell and the Eagles. But, I did also want to put something in there for the real music lovers - a reference to the Johnny Nash song, "I Can See Clearly Now."

During the sessions for the album, I had a real desire to add some sound effects to make the record feel more like an experience and less like a collection of unrelated songs. For a short while, I even considered naming the record, "No Matter What Song Is On," since the sentiment of the song was the closest to the thread that could join all the songs on the record into one thought. But, when the final album title came up, I quickly changed my mind.

At any rate, I must thank my good friend Jason Vivrette for lending his voice to the intro of the song. He has this amazing, boomy radio voice, and so we recorded him doing some segues into songs as a radio DJ. After that, to get the feeling that the listener might be switching the radio dial to find the song, my engineer Keith Armstrong and myself had to devise a way to get the right sound. Since neither of us had a radio with us, we had to resort to using a car radio. Keith's car had a digital dial, so we would use it.

The problem was that we couldn't reach a microphone all the way out to his car from the studio. So, instead, we used a cell phone to call into the studio from his car, and we recorded the sound of dial changing through the phone. When we checked it, and pieced together the radio voice with the cell phone, there was a high pitched flutter in the switching that was not in the original announcer recording. The announcer part sounded too clean in comparison, so we had to add the flutter noise to make it sound cohesive. We faded the flutter as we got closer to the song, so by the time the melody comes in, the recording is clean.

That's about it for this week, but I promise that your next Album InSite will be on time, and next week. Thanks for checking in, and I'll hopefully see some of you Los Angelinos at the Yard in Santa Monica on Sunday.

Cheers,
Ben

Hey, all

The new Web Exclusive cut has been posted on the Music page. It's called "Across the Summer Sky," and was written as a wedding present to my brother and sister in-law. I hope you enjoy it. And, for those of you looking for lyrics to the Web Exclusive library of tunes, all three sets of words are now posted on the Lyric page.

To all of you Los Angelinos, I hope you can make it out this coming Wednesday to the Derby for our last Ben Schor concert for a little while. The show is part of a triple bill, produced by Sean Healy Presents, and including performances by a couple other cool LA Bands, Zap and Gamble & Strut. The show starts at 8, and we hope to see you there.

Enjoy the new track, and we'll see you soon.

Ben

Ahoy, Bloggers

After the last Album InSite, I think it's time to lighten the mood a bit with some words about "Bad Credit."

"Bad Credit" came to me in pieces. It was one of those songs that, miraculously enough, started out as a lonely lyric with no music to keep it company. Actually, it started out as a four-line verse. I remember being so excited when I wrote those lines, and showing them to everybody I saw on the day I wrote them. After that, I knew that these words needed the right setting. They needed a blues riff.

Next came the riff, which is certainly one of my personal favorites, and after that, the first draft of the song. I had outlined all the verses just as they are now, but much of the song was different. I brought it into my songwriter’s workshop, and everyone gave it a listen. Now, “Bad Credit” is a perfect example of how a little feedback goes a long way.

The original chorus for the tune was a mess. I got some feedback that less is more, and I intended to find out what that meant. It took several tries to find the right words to say just enough. I went back to my blues record collection, and listened to a lot of Stevie Ray Vaughn. Most of the traditional old blues tunes were simple, consisting of only a few words, and usually those words were in the title and the hook of the song. In the search for those few words, I came up with the lines, “You might argue that you’re being fair to me/but this is cruel, baby, can’t you see?” It didn’t take much more time before I had the chorus. Total words used in hook: 6. Total notes used: 4.

In many ways, “Bad Credit” was a milestone for me as a writer because it forced me to be concise, and that’s something I’ve taken into account on every song I’ve written since. And, strangely enough, I didn’t even make that connection until right now!