A Zero For A Heart
I saw a ghost, underneath the apple tree…
Hey, a new(ish) mothershout track. A Zero For A Heart. You can listen to it on Spotify and YouTube. You might like it. This post is all about it.
Rules
As well as the general Rules of mothershout, I try to come up with some additional constraints or objectives for each track. The idea is to try and learn something new each time, and to stop myself falling back into old habits. For this track, the extra rules were:
Much more drum-driven than any previous mothershout track; it should be danceable.
Faster than previous tracks; faster tracks need different playing styles.
No piano! I love the piano, but this rule was to force me to work harder on the guitar parts.
A more Latin feel; a tresillo rhythm.
Origins
The title came first. It’s a line from Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, though he uses it to describe a casino (a pulsing fat-cat with a zero for a heart).
Some people are able to decide what a song will be about before they even start to write it. Other times, the song forms around an idea, like a pearl in an oyster forms around grit. In this case, I had that line, and nothing else, so I wrote it down in the Big Book Of Song Titles and left it alone for a while.
I came up with the main riff while practicing guitar. Playing over multiple strings is tricky, so I started making up patterns that were challenging, and the riff came from that. It’s fun to play, especially with a slightly overdriven guitar sound. I paused my practice and when I came back I had the whole introduction chord progression and riff in my head, leading to the long chiming Am and Am(9) chords that come before the first verse.
There’s a long tradition of writing song lyrics1 by using nonsense words as placeholders to sing the melody, and replacing them later. George Harrison had trouble when writing Something; he had the line attracts me like… and couldn’t finish it. John Lennon suggested singing attracts me like a cauliflower as a working line. And Paul McCartney sang scrambled eggs, oh my baby how I love your legs as the words to Yesterday. For Zero, the words I saw a ghost underneath the apple tree popped into my head. I thought they were just placeholders, but they ended up kicking off the whole of the first verse.
The song evolved to be about how communities can be broken apart for commercial reasons. The Welsh village of Tryweryn was flooded to create a dam to provide water for industry around the city of Liverpool. The flood drowned the whole village, including the cemetery. There are similar examples in many places, including the Site C dam being built in British Columbia that’s flooding some First Nations’ burial grounds. The man with a hole in his soul / and a pocket full of gold / and a zero for a heart is anyone who values the bottom line over what the effect is on humans and their connections to their places and their past.
Music Theory Geek Time
Like the riff, the harmony (by which I mean the chord progression) comes from an exercise. The harmonic minor scale is fun to play around with, and I was experimenting with creating variations on it.
There’s a cliché used in lots of minor key music, especially if it has a Latin flavour. It’s Im bVII bVI V (Am G F E in this case). You’ll hear it in the verses of The Stray Cat’s Stray Cat Strut (Spotify, YouTube), and Bob Dylan’s One More Cup Of Coffee (Spotify, YouTube). And the intro and verse of Bonnie Tyler’s Holding Out For A Hero (Spotify, YouTube) and the verse of The Turtle’s Happy Together (Spotify, YouTube) and so on and so on.
The pattern Im bVII bVI V (Am G F E in this case) is a cliché, especially in Latin music, and a great thing to do with a cliché is to vary it. So in the verse, the progression becomes is Am G F Bb E, followed by Am G Dm E. Later on, Em substitutes for G and F is replaced by C. The cliché progression appears in the solo, but it’s extended to end on Dm (Am G F E Dm), followed by Dm C E and back to Am.
The chorus is in C (the relative major of Am) but includes E, partly to make it easy to jump back to Am after the chorus, but also because the shift between E and C is a lovely chromatic mediant movement.
The lead vocal harmony (which is difficult to hear separately at the start) is generally a third above the lead (because this is a pop song, and pop songs tend to use thirds) until the last chorus, where it changes to a fourth above. I borrowed the technique of super-tight vocals with a barely-audible harmony from Jeff Lynne of ELO; you can hear it in the first verse of Last Train To London.
The rhythmic pattern is what’s sometimes called a tresillo, 3-3-2 or tres-tres-y-dos, where the strong beats are 1, 4 and 7. The snare hits on 3, 4 and 7 so that there’s a good tension between a “straight” pattern and the tresillo. The pattern lends itself to triplets and pulled or pushed beats.
The Gear
For more details, see the Gear List in the About page.
The drums are Spitfire Audio’s Abe Laboriel Jr Drums. These sound great, but can be difficult to work with in a mix because they’re not a multi-output instrument. To get around this, there are six instances used; one playing the kick, one playing the snare, one playing the toms and so on.
The vocals are, as usual, done with Dreamtonic’s Synthesizer V 1.8. This song uses Eclipsed Sounds’ Solaria voice as the lead, and Dreamtonic’s Natalie voice for a quieter upper close harmony.
Apart from the drums and vocals, everything else is guitar. The electric guitar parts are all played on an Epiphone Dot. The acoustic guitar used in the chorus is a Maton EBG808C "Performer". The bass is a Squier Mini-P short-scale bass.
All the guitar parts (including the bass) use Scuffham Amps’ S-Gear guitar processor, which is really good. The main and solo guitars use modified S-Gear factory patches. The long swelling chords in the background (that don’t really sound like a guitar) are based on ambient patches for S-Gear by Artur Tadevosyan.
As always, everything was done in Logic Pro. The guitars were recorded DI into Logic through a Focusrite Scarlett 8i6 interface, so that the raw guitar audio is separate from the sound of the amp and effects. That lets me tweak the amplifier setup during mixing if I need to.
The Mix
An additional challenge that I set myself for this song was to use no reverb, except for a “room ambience” (on the drums and vocals), and the reverbs in the (simulated) guitar amps. This is another Jeff Lynne thing; he doesn’t like artificial reverb, and managed to achieve great ELO mixes without it, so I wanted to try that out, as much as possible. In fact, it sounds like there’s a lot more reverb than there really is, because the long ambient chords in the background give the illusion of it.
I’m pleased with how this track turned out. I think it’s a step up from (or at least as good as) You Feel Like Home (Spotify, YouTube), and I was rather proud of that track.
And Finally
If you like reading this sort of detail about how a song was created, feel free to subscribe. It’s free (and always will be). And I won’t bug you (too much).
Technically, it’s the song’s lyric (singular), but I haven’t met many musicians who use it that way. They’re called words or lyrics (plural) and that’s what I’m doing here.