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The
story of this song is interesting, by the time I was playing bass
with ¨Mabey lane¨ my ex band in Montana, I was given a
cd with tunes that we were planing to cover, one of them was ¨white
line¨ or ¨ragged glory¨ (I still have my doubts about
the name of it), a Neil Young song, I loved it right away, so
I wanted to do a nice bass line for it, and I also wanted it to
have a folky touch but folky from where I am from, Peru, it ended
up a cool cumbia - chicha - folk - rock mix bass line, I spent
a lot of time on it.... How i wish we could have recorded this
tune, but it is only in our memories now.... time passed by and
I left the band but the bass line was still sticked in my head.
after 6 months when I was living at the ¨pink house¨ in
downtown Bozeman with Tim and Greg a couple of good roommates
gringos, my dog was barking to someone outside so i had to go
out and control him... he was barking to a girl walking by wearing
headphones and singing... so after saying sorry for my dog I asked
her if she was into singing and she said yes... so invited her
to do some music together..... man....she thought it for about
a minute.... and finally we came in the house, showed to her some
of my music and proposed her to do a Huayno in English, huayno
is folk music from Peru, She was interested, and when I was doing
a cd copy for her, mentioned to her about this bass line that
it was in my head and told her that I´d like to do something
about it, and she said... why don´t you make a copy of it
too.... but I didn´t have anything from it recorded....
then I decided to record it right there, and since the bass was
not available at that time... i ended up recording it with my
voice.... she took the cd with her and after a week she called
me saying she did some lyrics based on the melody of the bass
line, we got together again, she sang it for me and I loved it
not just the lyrics but also how this would fit with the melody,
we practiced it with the guitar and sounded good....practically
the bass line became the main melody. It was gonna be my first
song in English so were trying to decide who was gonna sing it...
hard to decide this .... so we made it a duet... which made it
special I think.
Regarding
the recording of this song .... we only got together for a rehearsal
before doing the real recording... fortunately this rehearsal
was recorded cause after a week I had to left town for reasons
I would prefer not to tell, ........ on the road without north
and without destiny I ended up in Colorado, after 2 weeks of living
in my car finally got ahold of Chris a good friend from my home
town and crushed on his couch for almost a month and before finding
a job and start saving some money again, I didn´t want to
abandoned this cd project so I figured a way to setup my recorder
and monitors on a little corner of his apartment, I rescued the
takes from that rehearsal we had, put some bass, guitar solo and
some patchs here and there and the song rised up!..
Mala
Lengua
this
song was born one of those endless nights of insomnia, the ¨Brunetta¨(*)
was at hand, playing around suddenly 4 chords started to sound
interesting and fresh to me that invited me to improvise with
my voice... when I went to try to sleep again I said to myself...I
hope I can remember it tomorrow... and I did .... I added it a
couple breaks, turned on the recorder, play/rec and I ended up
with a 11 minutes song, the melody of it was done mumbling with
my voice like i usually do when a new song pop up, but when I
listened to it again, I was enchanted and decided to let it like
that, i think mumbling around is pretty much improvizing with
your main instrument, the voice and realized it gives me more
freedom to express myself, without patterns... pure expression.
sure it was tempting to put lyrics to it but at that moment i
was having hard times releasing some of my songs to the public,
because of the things I said on them, and the way my thinking
was changing... so I was getting cornered for them, and I had
so many things to say and shout on this song...and it was this
fear of getting cornered for my songs again to name the song ¨Mala
Lengua¨ (bad tongue)......does it make sense to U?
personally i think is my master peace.... love it.
(*)
Brunetta is a Gibson J-45, Tim ¨el chico pito¨ my roommate
won it on a rafle with a ticket a bought for him.....
Claro
Azul
in
2001 made a decision, to finish my career and put aside the guitar,
I was determined,...well .... I thought so..... till I met a girl
that put me back on the rails of the music, the things that a
girl can do to You are unimaginable, the song speaks by itself.....
in spanish though...... ¨¨claro azul¨ (light blue)
...my favorite colour..
Piel
(skin/flesh)
Recorded
in 2005 in a basement bedroom of the cheapest motel in Bozeman,
MT, US. it was impossible to do it at home, my ex girlfriend´s
mother was visiting us so I had to made up a story.....¨a
very important trip to do¨.....enough to create the time frame
of a week to finish this song and record it, I also had the "john
lennon songwriting contest" last day submission coming up
and I wanted to participate on it.
It was hard to record this one, actually it was the first time
I was doing this, so to learn the technical part (multitracks,
microphones, etc..) it wasn´t the only rough part but also
dealing with the motel noise, although the acoustics of the place
wasn´t that bad.
Why-no
That´s what I said to myself when I was deciding to include
it on the album, I was a snobist growing up so I didn´t
learn, enjoyed, neither paid the right attention to the music
of my country which is beautiful, and I can´t wait to go
back there and look for it, cause "why-no" is just the
memory of an andean melody stuck in my head.
El
Olvido (
The Oblivion... not sure about the translation)
also
recorded at the same basement bedroom.....I might tell the story
eventually, right now I am still trying to forget...
........I
will be commenting more about the other tunes later.....
Adios
choloman. |
