Moonglow

It’s Halloween¹ 2024 (when this post is published) and here’s a little Halloween-ish song I wrote, called Moonglow.

It’s also available on Spotify and Apple Music (and all the other streaming services).

As usual, this post is about how I wrote, arranged and recorded the song. If you like what you read, feel free to subscribe using the button below, and/or send this on to someone you know who might enjoy it. Or send me more detailed questions and comments by email to mothershout@substack.com. Or not, if you don’t want to. It’s all good.

The Origins

I remember exactly where the title Moonglow came from. On the Electric Light Orchestra’s album Out Of The Blue, there’s a track called Starlight, and the last verse starts with the lines:

Moonglow
Come light the way up to my window
(I hear you callin', callin', callin', callin')

That album came out when I was a teenager and already fascinated by music, and was a huge influence on me. The title and the first two lines of Moonglow are directly inspired by Starlight: Moonglow, I see you calling at my window.

Anyway, here are the words for Moonglow. They tell a story, but I made an effort to avoid being too obvious about what’s happening. I’ll won’t explain it yet in case you feel like working it out for yourself.

Moonglow
I see you calling at my window
I can’t resist the thought of you though
You bring out the animal in me

Silver
Your gentle touch can make me shiver
And all my skin begins to quiver
I feel the beast I long to be

As the tides in the ocean rise up to the shore
This yearning inside that I cannot ignore
All my fear and my feelings dissolve in the flood
It’s all in the blood

All the shadows around me, I move through the night
The moon is my mother who lends me her light
And the sound of your heartbeat calls from afar
To where you are

Moonlight
You stand alone beside the firelight
You waited for me until this night
Now you are everything I see

Silver
You move in silence like a killer
You pierce my heart when you deliver
The sudden move that sets me free

All the light fades away as I fall to the floor
The pain in my heart that I cannot restore
And I feel as I’m falling the call of the moon
As she steals in the room
I’ll be with her soon
In the light of the moon
The light of the moon
The moon

The story is that the singer is a werewolf, and the light of the full moon calls her to change from woman² to wolf. If we’re getting all musical-theatre about it, you can imagine that the change happens during the guitar solo. Then, as a werewolf, she hunts down her victim, but they have been waiting for her, she’s shot with a silver bullet, and she dies in the light of the moon. Suitable for Halloween, I think.

I wrote the music back in 2023, but didn’t have any good ideas for the words, so it stayed in the big pile of Ideas That Might Work Someday. Then one evening I was reading about the 1981 movie An American Werewolf In London and how it used several songs about the moon, remembered the line from Starlight … and the whole idea for the song dropped into my head. I liked the idea of writing from the point of view of someone who enjoys being a werewolf. It brings out the animal in her…

The Artwork

The image is a cropped version of an original by Ron Lach, on Pexels.com. Like Unsplash, Pexels is a platform for human-made (non-AI) artwork, licensed to anyone for free. I thought about using a photo of the orange/red-tinged “blood moon” that appears during a lunar eclipse, but that felt a bit too obvious. I like that this image works as a reference to the first line, about the moon at the window, and doesn’t give away the story.

Yes, it is obviously a fake moon. But I like that because the song feels a bit like a play or an old-style movie to me. Hollywood has broken hearts before with a paper moon over a cardboard sea.

The Rules

As usual, I set myself some rules when I started arranging and recording. These are the rules I came up with for this version (more on that below):

• Use that kind of guitar sound. It’s a mostly-clean, twangy sound with a tremolo and a spring reverb, played low on the guitar neck, with a metal pick. Sort of Spaghetti Western-ish. This is the latest variant on the sound that’s also on A Zero For A Heart, and I love it. Also, it gives a good dark-and-sinister vibe that fits the song.

• Use a bolero-style rhythm. More on that below.

• In a vaguely gothic style. I don’t mean gothic in the usual musical sense (lots of black clothes and eyemakeup, sounding like The Cure or early albums from The Sisters of Mercy). I mean gothic in the sense of dramatic.

• Use a minimal approach to harmony - as few chords as possible. The backing instruments (piano and organ) use many two-note lines and generally avoid playing full chords.

• Major dynamic changes from quiet (and slightly sinister?) to soaring. Dynamic changes can be hard to pull off, which makes for a more interesting arrangement challenge.

The Arrangement

This is the second version of Moonglow. The first version was quite different; there was an orchestra, acoustic guitars, a different rhythm… but it didn’t work. Too polished. So I threw away everything except the voice and started over.

Let’s do a quick walk through the song…

The Intro

The very first things you hear are a bass guitar and a ride cymbal. Using a ride rather than a hihat brings a vaguely jazzy feel. The guitar comes in almost immediately, playing a little theme that repeats throughout the song. I’m trying to use the guitar sound together with the vaguely Latin-ish percussion and the offbeat piano to set the scene and give the listener an idea of what style of song this is.

Verse A 1

Moonglow, I see you calling at my window…

There are two different types of verse in this song. Type A verses start with a single word (like moonglow or silver) and type B verses start with a whole line (like as the tides in the ocean or all the shadows around me). The two types have different (but closely related) melodies and chord progressions. I could pretend to be clever and give a fancy arrangement reason for why there are two types of verse, but the truth is that I had two ideas and didn’t want to discard either of them. So I used both.

In this first verse, the drums are playing quietly, with a sidestick instead of snare hits, and the guitar disappears after the intro. The piano and bass provide a minimal framework for the voice, because I want to let that vocal melody shine.

Then for the second half, (after the word silver), the guitar comes back in and the drums become a touch more assertive. Partway through, the organ begins to play low in the background to fill out the harmony.

Verse B 1

As the tides in the ocean rise up to the shore…

The melody changes, and the chord progression switches (to start on Gm rather than C). There’s another rise in level; the drums are more energetic and the organ is louder. These B verses have a slightly odd metrical structure; sometimes there are three bars to a line, sometimes two, because I like the slightly disjointed feeling that gives.

At the end of the verse, everything ramps up more and we get…

Yet Another Guitar Solo

I’m not going to apologize for putting guitar solos in my songs, because I like ‘em. I like writing them and I like playing them. And I’m trying to have the solo serve the song, not just be an excuse for flashy playing (I am no guitar hero). The solo guitar plays a melody based on a variation of the chords used in the verses, and it’s written to soar, and to give the song an early dynamic peak. The guitar sound is bigger (you can hear the point where I stamp on the overdrive pedal to give it more gas) and the organ player is having a great time playing big swelling chords.

Verse B 2

All the shadows around me…

Before the solo, there’s a loud Verse B. Immediately after the solo, the level drops back down for this quiet Verse B, to showcase the voice melody a little more. The verse ends on a jump to an unexpected DbM7 chord and the song pauses. And then we switch back to…

Verse A 2

Moonlight…

Back to the first melody, and a quiet start to this Verse A, to match the way the song began. The drums drop out for four bars until coming back in differently, with a hihat instead of the ride cymbal. The beat is more rock-ish than jazzy now, and the energy level starts building up again.

Verse B 3

All the light fades away…

The dramatic end to the story. Everything’s played with more energy, Solaria’s singing with more passion and it all leads up to the end, where the drums stop and leave just the singer, guitars and organ to bring the song to a close.

That Beat

Previous posts got some nice feedback on the breaking down of the track to show how it was put together, so I’m going to do that again.

I’m going to start with the congas, because I recorded them first:

This is part of a bolero rhythm (explained very nicely in this video on bolero percussion). The last three notes in each bar are key, because they’ll appear later on, played on other instruments. The congas also set up a good solid pulse that the other percussion instruments respond to.

Next, add a shaker:

The congas are playing in fours; you can count them as 1, 2, 3, and-4-and. The shakers are playing in threes; 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. That’s a tresillo rhythm, and it adds a sense of movement to the straighter beat of the congas. The shaker also appears to move from left to right as it’s played, to mimic how a human (me) would actually shake it. (I didn’t shake it; it’s a sampled shaker and I played it on a drum pad).

Now I’ll add the last two percussion instruments. On the left is a guiro, on the right is a clave:

The guiro adds another key element of the bolero rhythm, as demonstrated in this part of the bolero rhythm video. It’s the little “rasp” at the start of every bar. Below, I’ll show how other elements of the rhythm reinforce that.

Clave is a fancy percussionist name for a pair of sticks that are hit together, and it’s also the name of a family of rhythmic patterns used in African, Cuban and Latin music. This clave is playing a 2-3 son clave pattern; two hits in the first half of the bar, three in the second. A bolero would normally use a 3-2 son clave, which reverses the order of the two- and three-hit sections, but this pattern fits this song better.

Okay, so the percussion is being all Latin in the background. What are the drums doing? I’ll start with the kick drum, because that’s the real foundation of the rhythm:

It’s playing the strong hits from the same pattern as the shaker: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. That tresillo pattern is the overall pulse of the song; it shows up in the vocal melody, in the bassline, in the guitar part and in the piano.

Next, the ride cymbal and the crash cymbals:

The ride cymbal is playing a little three-hit pattern that matches what the guiro is doing, and it also slips in and out of the clave pattern.

Finally, the snare drum, which is playing sidestick hits at the start of the song, and the toms:

I had an image in my head when I was building the drum and percussion tracks; of a band playing in a bar in New Orleans, on a hot, dark night, with the singer swaying up front. The rhythm is trying to capture that image.

A Bit Of Harmony On Toast

A good friend of mine admitted that she skips the music theory bit of these posts. Understandable, because usually I’m geeking out like crazy on harmony, chords and tensions (oh my). But stay with me here, because I’m going to try something new; explaining how the song works musically without getting all technical, and using actual listenable examples. [I’ll put any technical stuff in square brackets like this so you can skip it].

Okay. A great way to make music interesting is to set you (the listener) up to expect one thing and to then give you something else. The harmony in this song starts right off that way.

We start the song with a nice comfortable C major chord. That’s the “tonic”, or “home chord” or “musical centre”. But then we shift one (and only one) of the notes in that C chord up by one note on the piano (the smallest change we can make). The effect is a slightly “unsettled” or “restless” chord, and when we return back to C, the effect is to “resolve” that unsettled, restless feeling. (This is played on the electric piano I used in the song). [This is C major and C+ - the G moves to G#]:

(These are the two chords in the intro at the very start of the song).

We pick up patterns in the music we hear through our lives, and our brains make predictions about what we’re listening to. When you hear a C major chord, whether you know what it is or not, your mind probably assumes that it’ll hear other chords that fit the key of C major. The second chord in that example doesn’t fit C major and that gives it tension, which is what makes it unsettled. (Also, that single changed note is the highest note, which makes it stand out more).

I sometimes think about chords as though they’re flavours. The C major is nice and familiar and comforting - a vanilla musical flavour. The C+ chord that follows has a hint of delicious “sourness” about it, caused by changing just that one note. There are many ways to vary the flavour of that unsettled chord. You can think of it like adding touches of other flavours; a little extra lemon juice to give the sourness depth, or a touch of spice for variation. Here’s an example of that [C major and Fm/C - the G moves to Ab and the E moves to F]:

The middle chord now sounds more unsettled, because two notes have been altered. We can change the flavour in yet another way, by making a different change [C and Ab/C - G moves to Ab, E moves to Eb]:

What I’m trying to illustrate here is one of the key principles of how chord progressions work; start somewhere, add tension, then remove tension. In these examples, the tension’s being added on the second chord and then immediately removed. But we can also reduce the tension gradually, in a more interesting way:

[That’s C FmM7 Ab/Eb DbM7 C] It starts on the warm, welcoming C major chord, then move away to an unsettled chord, change “flavours” by moving through a number of unsettled chords and finally resolve back to home, C major.

From this point of view, the chord progressions in this song are really not that fancy. They add and remove tension, and always eventually arrive back at the home chord. All the chords in these examples appear in the song.

As I wrote above, starting on a C major chord sets up an expectation in the listener; that they’ll hear chords in the key of C major. These altered chords are not in that key, so they don’t meet the expectation, and they’re tense, unsettled chords. The whole effect is (supposed to be) slightly spooky. Which is fine, for a Halloween song about a werewolf.

The Sound

I’ve been trying out something over the last couple of tracks; limiting myself to using late 1960s/1970s audio technology. Well, partly.

Modern audio processing is incredibly powerful. For a basic audio task like equalization (adjusting the overall tone of audio, a more sophisticated version of raising or lowering the bass or treble) I have access to more fine-grained and semi-automatic control of individual frequencies than any previous generation of audio engineers. And sometimes there’s just too much capability and flexibility.

If I limit myself to the sort of equalization that would have been around in the late 1960s (for The Beatles’ last two albums, for example), I have much less choice and control, and that’s liberating. This is really just the same reasoning that led me to rule out using synthesizer sounds in my instruments - reducing choices means that I don’t end up down a rabbithole of endless adjustment, searching for the Ideal Sound.

The sound of Moonglow, then, is quite retro, and that’s completely intentional.

For other audio geeks, here’s a quick list of what I used. Everything’s done using software plugins, not original hardware units, because I want retro creative constraints and sound, not to fill up my tiny studio area with cables. Also, hardware costs a lot more and I’m neither rich nor famous.

• Compression is done with either an LA-2A or UA1176. The master bus has an SSL G-bus compressor on.

• EQ is either iZotope’s Neutron 4 (which is very modern) or a Neve 1073 console EQ emulation (Waves’ Scheps 73).

• Some tracks are using Waves’ Abbey Road Saturator, which is set to emulate the older REDD 17 mixing console used at Abbey Road Studios from the 1950s.

• Many tracks use a J37 tape recorder for the sound of tape compression and saturation. Also, all the delays are done on the J37.

• The reverbs are Abbey Road Chambers (emulating the tiled room used at Abbey Road to get a short reverb) and Abbey Road Plates (the plate reverbs installed there in 1957). Both are done using Waves plugins.

• The voice is sometimes processed by an Abbey Road ADT (Automatic Double Tracking) plugin, which emulates the tape-based double-tracking built by Ken Townsend to make John Lennon’s life easier when doubling vocals.

The instruments used were:

• Epiphone Dot electric guitar, for the single electric guitar part that runs through the whole song. The guitar’s run through an Scuffham S-Gear amp emulation, with a switchable distortion pedal added for the solo. When I was in my teens I found an American dime coin to play with and thought that was cool. I still have it (plus a bunch of spares), and I use it to get a more biting sound.

• Squier Mini-P bass, through a Line 6 Helix amp emulation, played with fingers.

• Logic’s factory Hammond B3 organ emulation (which seems to get better every time I use it). The same setup as Two Lane Highway and Rise - multiple pedals.

• Modartt’s Pianoteq emulating a Rhodes electric piano. Both this and the organ were played on an M-Audio Hammer 88 keyboard, which I never mention but is always a joy to use.

• Native Instrument’s Abbey Road drums; the 1960s kit (recorded with towels on the drums for a more dampened sound). They’re played using a Native Instruments Maschine Mikro 3 controller.

• Percussion is from the Logic Pro factory instruments plus Creative Toolbox Percussion from Strezov Sampling. Mostly played using the Mikro controller.

• The voice is Eclipsed Sound’s Solaria, using Dreamtonics’ Synthesizer V software.

1. Or Hallowe’en, if you’re pedantic. Like I am.

2. I generally don’t write gendered lyrics. She is a werewolf because the singer’s voice is very definitely a female soprano.