Forever and ever

September 16th, 2009

…about the song Forever. This song started just like the rest of our songs. I listened to Poets of the Fall, and tried to make a song that would sound just like them. I hardly ever fail. Some might say that this “behind the scenes” is a bit late, after all, it’s been almost two years since the song was recorded. But I guess now is a good time to finally write this, since an acoustic version is already on the making.

Let’s go through the version heard on Stay Silent Forever first. The verse riff is actually an old one, a look back tells me that it was a part of a track called “dropped.mp3″ (because it’s played in dropped tuning). It’s from the era, when I didn’t even know that I would play in a band some day. The original riff was almost the same as the one heard on the released track. It just needed some minor adjustments. It actually had a nice guitar part on the chorus, but I couldn’t come up with a melody to fit that line, so I wrote a pop chorus instead. You can’t go wrong with a catchy pop chorus.

After I retackled the song and made an intro (I browsed through my own emails, and found out that I had sent the second version, now titled “forever”, to the guys at the beginning of 2006), a new chorus and a c-part, I feel like I’m repeating myself, but again, this was pretty much the version that is heard on Stay Silent Forever. Basically there’s just more guitars than on the second demo version. The only added gimmicks were the syncopated hits at the middle and the stop at the end of the second verse. And, as said, a lot of added guitars. Some of the sounds might sound like they’re made with a synth, but that is not the case. All are made with guitar, bass, drums or vocal chords. If you’ve read through the studio journals you know that there’s a lot of feedback noise. We spent an hour or a few recording those. Jouni was really pissed off then, he had had enough of feedback already halfway through. But in the end, it paid off. It came out just as good as I imagined. Other really sort of key additions were the solo-like guitars to the chorus. It complitely changes the feel of the chorus. I remember us thinking for some time if we should just discard them, but in the end decided to keep them (too). Obviously, this has some drawbacks too. The more stuff you have going on, the harder it becomes to hear everything. There is always the danger that there’s just simply too much of everything and the song just becomes a blurry mass. And Forever certainly has those moments in which it’s on the edge of flipping to that side.

The c-part goes in 7/8 as the rest of the song goes in 8/8. I deliberately made the c-part to go in different time signature. The idea of “experimenting” with a time signature not divisible by 3 or 4 had been in my head for a while, but I hadn’t come up with a song to which it would fit. Forever seemed suitable, and hence the part. So this wasn’t something that just popped out of the blue sky, but rather a part made with a clear goal in mind.

I have to admit, I can’t remember much about making the song. That’s the downside of writing these journals two years late. I remember spicing up the drums by stealing things from Lars. It’s a good musical barrel to loan stuff from. He has quite a distinct style, especially with cymbals. Lars often hits cymbals to weird spots. If I remember correctly, we also edited the drum beat of the outro. During mixing we noticed that the bass drum pattern didn’t fit the rest of the stuff, so we had to delete some single bass drum hits. That’s modern recording. And if it doesn’t do the trick, it’ll be fixed in the marketing.

As I said, the acoustic version is on the making. Actually it’s already recorded, but we’re kind of fooling around with orchestrations now. We’ll see how that turns out. We are probably way over our heads on that. But we’ll probably keep the simple version too, and will make an elevator version with violins, flutes, cellos and everything, the whole nine yards, you know. The plain version turned out quite nice (apart from the bad quitar playing, since yours truly can’t stay in tempo), really different from the electric version. And naturally, that was the whole idea. There’s no use in making a carbon copy of the original one.

Hmm… what else? Can’t remember anything worth telling. Yeah right, like any of the previous anecdotes were interesting. The pain just grows and stays forever, and so on.

-Kari