You know the way that recipe blogs work online these days? Before you get to the recipe there’s a whole story about the food and how the author’s partner and family reacted to it, a cute anecdote about their dog, huge artistic pictures of the food plated up in some designer kitchen and the whole thing littered with adverts. And then finally the recipe comes right at the end.
Yeah, I don’t do that. No ads, no dog stories, and the music comes right at the start. This is Two Lane Highway.
It’s on Spotify, and on YouTube right here:
Okay, this might be considered an ad… if you like this post and/or the song, feel free to share it with someone else…
And if you want to get an email when I release a new song and write another post about it, you can subscribe. I only send emails when I release songs, and I don’t do advertising or anything else to “monetise” this Substack. Because I do all this for fun.
Now, on with the writeup…
Jilted Genre
(That’s a fairly obscure reference to Jilted John’s 1978 single, Jilted John. Which I am not going to link to because it has, er, limited appeal.)
I release my music through a distribution company called Distrokid, who upload it to all the streaming services for me. When I create a release, they ask me to identify the genre of the track, and I always have trouble answering. When people ask me what type of music I write, the best answers I have are intelligent pop or maybe jazz-influenced pop. Neither of which are valid genres for Distrokid. And also, Spotify has 6,000 genres of music. I have no idea what most of them are.
So I got Cyanite, an AI service, to listen to this track and tell me what genres it matched. It is apparently 36% Folk/Country, 18% Pop and 1% or less of a bunch of other genres. So I classified it as a Folk song. I don’t own the right sort of hat to feel good about choosing Country. Plus, I don’t want to go up against Beyoncé right now.
Cyanite also gives me a bunch of other opinions on the song:
The best “vibe match” with a Spotify playlist is 70s Hits. I rather like that - I’m very influenced by the music of the 70s, and that was pretty much what I was going for in the arrangement and production.
The second best vibe playlist match was with Top 50 Kids Songs. This sort of thing is why AIs can’t be trusted.
It’s equal parts “happy” and “chill” and has a Positive Emotional Profile. At least it’s not Dark and Sombre.
It’s 61% Retro and 22% Cool. So, like The Fonz, right?
The Story Behind It
In the post about Tell Me What You’re Looking For, I wrote that the next song wouldn’t sound anything like Tell Me. This is not that next song. I planned to release a song called Grow Up To Be Cowboys, but it just wouldn’t co-operate and sound right1. So I put it away and switched to working on this song, which has been waiting for about a year to have its moment.
The Start
The initial spark came, as they often do, from messing around on a musical instrument2. I was playing an acoustic guitar one evening, and came up with the guitar riff that starts the song; what you hear in the introduction. It’s simpler than it sounds; any guitarist would get it pretty quickly. (In fact, for any guitarists out there, tab notation for the original way I played it, in Am, is below in the Music Theory section.) I spent some time playing around with it, sped it up (to 170 beats per minute) and it evolved into the verse and chorus.
I did a test recording, experimenting with the sound of the guitar. As soon as I put the echo on it (called a slapback echo, because the echo “slaps back” very quickly after the guitar sound), everything came together for a sort of rocky, maybe even a little country, maybe even Dire Straits-y sound.
But a guitar riff isn’t enough for a song. There’s also the ever so crucial little, tiny detail of a vocal melody, and words for that voice to sing.
The Words
I try not to get all mystical about songwriting, because I find it vaguely irritating when musicians say things like I don’t know where the song came from or I only receive the songs from the Universe (while still accepting the royalty payments). As far as I can tell, songwriting is like any other human creative act; we absorb a bunch of influences and ideas from other people, our minds stir it all up together and we pick out different elements and recombine them.
And sometimes that happens unconsciously. I woke up with the vocal melody for this song in my head and then spent a week turning it around mentally, trying to work out if I’d fallen into the ever-lurking trap of songwriters; directly (but accidentally) lifting something from some other song. I couldn’t remember or find anything that sounded the same, so I’m calling it original. Or at least, original enough, because I admit I am the sum of my musical influences.
Bernie Taupin and Elton John wrote songs in an unusual way. Bernie would write the words alone, and when they were finished, he’d give them to Elton who would come up with the music. I have no idea how that would work - I need to have the music done first otherwise I don’t know what to fit the words to.
I started with the melody’s pattern; the rhythm of the notes, where the stresses are and which notes are long or short. From that I came up with some words that fit the first chorus. The repeated long I, followed by phrases like am out where I can find the space to breathe and feel like I’m walking in a world that’s built for speed led to is it what I want or what I need, and that was enough to get going. Many songwriters use nonsense words as a starting point, but I like it all to make some kind of sense as soon as possible.
For me, this part of writing a song is like solving a complex puzzle. The words need to fit together in several different ways, all at once:
They need to fit the rhythm and pattern of the song. Sometimes the same pattern works throughout the song (Tell Me What You’re Looking For is a good example), but in this case I wanted some variations to add interest and compensate for the simple melody. For example, the verses and choruses all have slightly different rhythms - words influenced the rhythms and vice versa.
They need to be singable; it’s easy to write words that only work on paper, but don’t fit the voice. For example, the word bleed (from the second chorus) only has one syllable, but it’s difficult to sing that way. It’s better as buh-leed, but there has to be enough time available to split the word up.
The words need to rhyme, in a pattern. A rhyme scheme is the pattern of which lines rhyme with others. In this song, the first and third lines of each verse rhyme together, so do the second and fourth, and all three lines of the chorus (mostly). Sometimes I came up with a great line, but couldn’t find a matching rhyme that worked and I’d have to throw it away and start again.
They need to make sense and tell some sort of consistent story. (Unless you’re Jon Anderson writing lyrics for Yes3). Sometimes I have to write a fair amount of the song before I get a clear idea of what it could be about. Then I have to go back and rewrite what I have to fit.
Do you know how many rhymes there are for need? According to RhymeZone, around 228 decent rhymes, including 88 good ones. The rhyming scheme I’d come up with for this song that meant that each chorus ended with three rhyming lines, and the last line always ended with need. Even with 228 possible rhymes it took me an unreasonably long time to figure out lines that rhymed with need and fit with the meaning of the song.
The pattern of the last line of each verse changes; the first one, blinking in the blue and summer shine leaves nearly a whole bar before the chorus, but in the second verse we get will drown you in a second, don’t you dare to close your eyes; four syllables longer. And in the last verse the stuff of tiny miracles that rise up irresistible is so long that it comes right up to the first note of the last chorus. Those longer lines let the vocal melody repeat a phrase, which is the sort of melodic geekery I like, and they also link the verses to the choruses more. In fact, I don’t really think this song has choruses; they’re more like extensions of the verses, since almost none of the chorus lines are repeated.
Here are the words:
The far horizon shimmers on the edge of inner space
Two lane highway running to the line
And all the people passing by are all a single face
Blinking in the blue and summer shine
But I am out where I can find the space to breathe
And I feel like I’m walking in a world that’s built for speed
Is this what I want or what I need?
Down inside the canyons with a sky of shivered glass
A tide of restless runners on the rise
The ever-rolling river from the future to the past
Will drown you in a second, don’t you dare to close your eyes
And I feel every single cut that made me bleed
And I can hear the vampires coming out to feed
On everything you thought you need
Deep inside the silence and the shadows of the trees
Everything untangles and I see
The constant cross-connections from the snowlines to the seas
A million tiny miracles that rise up irresistible
And I can feel a little hope in every seed
And hey, though nothing in this life is guaranteed
Someday we might finally believe
What we have is everything we need
Assonance
If you’ve forgotten your high school English, assonance is “a resemblance in the sounds of words/syllables either between their vowels (e.g., meat, bean) or between their consonants (e.g., keep, cape)”. I like using assonance because I think it ties the words together, even though it makes it even more complicated to write.
For example, in the first line of the first verse, the far horizon shimmers on the edge of inner space, the words on and edge share a starting sound, and the same first vowel sound links shimmers and inner. In the third line, and all the people passing by are all a single face, we get repetition of all, as well as people passing by - two p sounds and a closely related b. Then blinking in the blue and summer shine has blinking and blue, and summer and shine. And so on. Rhymes and relations within single lines.
My favourite bit of assonance is million tiny miracles that rise up irresistible - the i sounds in tiny and rise match, and the three vowel sounds in miracles rhyme with the last three vowels in irresistible. I awarded myself a bonus cup of coffee after coming up with that.
The Meaning
Of course you’re free to interpret the song any way you like, but to me, it’s about stepping away from the hustle and pace of a busy life to find peace in more natural surroundings. Not very profound, perhaps, but it’s meaningful to me. And the meaning is expressed using indirect words and images, which is how I like it.
The memory that sparked the first verse was of being on a highway in Alberta. Much of that province is flat, so the sky feels huge and the horizon is like a line that divides the universe in two. All the cars and the drivers looked the same; busy, hurrying, driven, in contrast to how I wanted to feel.
The second verse is, rather obliquely, about the stress of working in the tech industry. I used to commute to downtown Vancouver, where there towers that make canyons with a sky of shivered glass. Lots of songs have used the image of time as a river rolling forward; I flipped it backwards to be the ever-rolling river from the future to the past, because the tech industry is always running forward, pulling from the future and discarding the past, and if you don’t keep yourself at the cutting edge of what’s happening you fall behind, really fast. I don’t really like the relentless acceleration of tech, and I’m often grateful and appreciative that I don’t work in that world anymore.
I’ll let you think about who the vampires are…
The third verse is written from another, better, point of view. A good friend of mine arranges nature walks through forests and parks around the Vancouver ares. She knows a huge amount about the natural world, and her deep love and appreciation for it comes through when she talks about it. The walks are often very slow, because every few steps she will point out something new and natural and wonderful, and explain how it interconnects with everything else. So this verse is about that way of looking at the world, in the rainforests of British Columbia, surrounded by tiny miracles and the constant cross-connections between living things, from the snowline to the seas.
The song had several working titles, but I ended up taking Two Lane Highway from the first verse, because I think this feels a little like a road-trip song.
The Rules
The creative constraints I gave myself when I arranged, recorded and produced this track included:
Follow the usual Rules of mothershout: “real” instruments (no synthesizer sounds), played in whole takes (as much as possible), and sounding like a band.
Arrange it for a band. On some songs (for example, The Sky Beneath My Feet) I’ll use a full orchestral string section and multiple guitars all double tracked for a Huge (and kinda unrealistic) Sound. In this case, I imagined a band with one rhythm guitar, one lead guitar, one bass, one piano, one organ, drums and vocals (I decided not to count percussion, or I’m assuming the singers are also the percussionists). I arranged the song so that band could play it, and tried to make it sound like it was recorded live.
Have the lead guitar be prominent. On Tell Me, the bass was probably the most important instrument (not including the voice), and the guitar parts were quite limited. On this track, I wanted the guitar to be up there, equal with the voice in prominence. That’s challenging because I had to write and learn a fairly complicated lead guitar part.
Make it sound a bit rock’n’roll, with a good backbeat and a drum part that’s a challenge to my still limited drumming skills.
How It Got Made
From the previous post about Tell Me, I got a lot of positive comments on the section that took the track apart to explain how it was made. So I’m going to do something like that again. Let’s take the start of the second verse (where all the instruments have joined in) and build it up.
The Rhythm Section
The drums are the foundation on which the whole track stands. I’m going to go one step deeper and start with just the kick drum:
Remember that boom-ba-doom pattern; it’s going to show up again. Let’s add the rest of the drums in:
That’s the drum part as I played it, but on the track it’s a little bit fancier. I put an echo on the snare and the hi-hat, and with those added it sounds like this:
The echo on the hi-hat is key, since it gives a faster feel without me needing to play that fast. Is that cheating? Well, recorded music has always used shortcuts - on Duran Duran’s first recordings, Roger Taylor recorded the hi-hat part separately4 to the rest of the drums to make it all easier to play. So if this is cheating, it’s minor. Plus, it all adds to the use of slap-back echo that’s all over this track and is key to the general vibe.
Now let’s add in the bass. Remember that kick drum pattern? Here’s the bass part; see if you can hear the same pattern in it:
When the drums and bass are together, you might be able to hear that:
The bass follows the kick drum pattern in the first three notes of each phrse
The space in the bass part (after the first note) lets the snare drum through
To complete the rhythm section, let’s add in some of the percussion; the bongos and the cowbell that help accent the beat. On their own they sound like this:
…and the whole rhythm section sounds like this:
The drums are the same ones I used on Tell Me - Native Instruments’ Abbey Road Drummer. It’s the 70s kit, recorded in Abbey Road Studio 2. The percussion is all Logic Pro library instruments. The bass is my Squier Mini-P short-scale bass, through Line 6’s Helix modelling software to simulate a bass amp and speaker cabinet.
The Groove
There’s no general agreement on what counts as the right word to use to describe the groove or the beat or the rhythm of a song. I’m going to use the word groove for two key instruments that help the song, well, groove. First, the rhythm guitar; it’s the first instrument you hear on the track, and at the start of the second verse it’s playing this:
That’s the same riff from the introduction, before the whole band joins in. Notice that it’s over on the left side, to keep it opposite the other groove instrument, the piano:
…which is over on the right side. You might be able to hear that the piano sounds a little “thin” on its own. At the very start of the song, before the bass comes in, the piano has its full sound, but as soon as the bass joins, the low frequencies of the piano have been cut out so that the bass comes through; the piano has a such a wide range that it can dominate pretty much any other instrument unless you handle it carefully.
When we put both guitar and piano together, we get:
I don’t know if you hear it, but for me there’s something rather magical that happens when you add a second instrument; they blend. Well, they do if they’re playing parts that fit together, as I think these do.
Before we add in the whole rhythm section, I’m going to bring in some more percussion, that I left out earlier. There’s a shaker on the left and a tambourine on the right. Each of these is positioned in stereo to match the guitar or piano, and the pattern each plays emphasises their related instrument:
And now we add the bass, drums and the rest of the percussion:
One thing I want to point out; many of the instruments, especially the bass, sound very different on their own than when you hear them together. A key part of arranging and mixing is listening to how the sounds of instruments change as they’re combined, and adjusting how they all fit together.
The rhythm guitar is my Maton acoustic. It feels a little unusual to use an non-strummed acoustic guitar for rhythm in a song like this, but I like the very “physical” sound. You can hear me playing it, the sounds of fingers and palm-muting the strings to emphasise the rhythm. Also, I wrote the original riff on that guitar so it felt right to use it.
The piano is, as usual, Modartt’s Pianoteq modelled piano; the Bechstein model, which has more of a punchy sound than a Steinway.
Filling In The Gaps
So far we have rhythm, bass and groove. But there’s something missing; it feels a bit empty. To fill up the space, I used a Hammond B3 organ. Not a real one, because I have neither the money or the space for it, but the really excellent emulation that comes with Logic Pro. It’s a wonderful instrument to play, but needs both hands and both feet to play it to its full glory.
(What you’re hearing here is a slightly fancier version of what’s on the released track; I added some higher tones and shimmery rotor effect to show off the organ a bit more).
And when we add everything else, we get:
One other trick the organ does is to stay lower and quieter in the verses, and then rise up as the chorus starts, to add a lift to the song. It’s hard to hear since there are three voices singing three-part harmony right then, but I like the way it separates the chorus from the verse.
Follow The Leader
Finally, the lead parts. A good rule of arrangement is that at any one point in a song there should be something (one thing) that draws the listener’s attention; the leading part. In fact, the rule5 (which is, of course, a guideline, because there are no real rules) is a bit more complicated, and is more about “arrangement elements”. Here are the five arrangement elements, and which instruments make up each element in this track:
The rhythm section: the bass and drums (and percussion).
The groove: the rhythm guitar and piano.
The pad: the organ that fills in the gaps. It's called a “pad” because it pads out the sound with a musical background.
The lead: the part that draws the listener’s attention; the voice and lead guitar.
The fills: any little phrase or moment that fills in a gap; drum fills, organ fills, guitar fills.
At any one time, no more than four of these should be playing at once. Humans can only pay attention to a limited number of things, and if too many elements are sounding at once, there’s too much going on and it gets confusing. A good basic arrangement trick is to have the first three elements play through most of a song, and have the lead and fills alternate so that they’re not both playing at once.
In this song, the lead is either the lead guitar or the voice, which generally alternate so only one of them is playing at any point. There are a couple of places where there’s no voice or lead guitar, and I drop in a little bit of organ playing or bass or a drum fill so that there’s always something to grab the attention.
When we add in the leads, we get this, the first eight bars of verse 2:
Did you notice that the lead guitar in the verses is slightly off to the left? It balances the organ, which is slightly on the right, and the rhythm guitar and piano are all the way to the left and right, balancing each other. Spreading out the instruments in stereo is a good way to help them all stay out of each other’s way and be more clearly heard. In the solos, the guitar moves to the centre and gets slightly louder. Imagine that the guitarist steps forward for solos, and then moves back when they’re done to leave centre stage to the vocalists.
Speaking of vocalists: the upper voice is Eclipsed Sounds’ Solaria and the lower is Dreamtonics’ Natalie, both in Dreamtonics’ Synthesizer V vocal synthesis plugin. For the long I sounds (and a couple of lines at the end) I added Dreamtonic’s Weina voice for a third harmony.
The guitar part in this section is carefully played so that it doesn’t move when the voices are singing; where the guitar and voices overlap, the guitar is usually quiet or just holds a single note, so that it doesn’t take attention away from the voice.
And that’s a cue to write more about the guitar…
Guitar Phrases
This is a pretty guitar-heavy track. As well as a rhythm guitar playing all the way through, there’s lead guitar sprinkled all over the verses and choruses, and two solos, one short and one long, to close each of the first two verses. As I’ve noted before, I am not great at spontaneously improvising on guitar. Writing this lead guitar part took me several days of playing, thinking, playing some more, deciding to give up the guitar and go live in a cave, and finally coming up with something that I’m rather pleased with.
I deliberately borrowed the approach that Dire Straits’ lead guitarist Mark Knopfler used on their first album. Even if you don’t know the band, you may remember the single Sultans Of Swing (Spotify, YouTube). Mark’s guitar “phrases”6 (short melodies) fit neatly into the spaces between the vocal lines, and each phrase connects two chords by starting on the first chord and landing on the next, emphasising the chord tones.
I used the same idea, and spent time thinking about the phrases before playing. If I leave the thinking to my fingers they tend to fall back on old clichés. (I’m not claiming my guitar parts aren’t clichés…). It starts with simple phrases in the first verse and chorus, more complex ones on the second, and towards the end the guitar is playing longer lines that intertwine with the vocals.
Mark Knopfler is known for playing with fingers rather than a pick, and I often play that way too, so it was a natural choice for this track. Using four fingers and a thumb instead of a pick makes it easier to play across several strings, and I think it allows for more fluid phrasing. It also causes more finger blisters than a pick, but hey, I’ll suffer for my art.
The solos use familiar tricks - repetition and variation. Sometimes they repeat a pattern but with different notes, sometimes one phrase will echo the one before or anticipate the one that follows. Playing the guitar in C natural minor (same notes as E♭ major) isn’t familiar to me, so I spent a day just “noodling”, playing whatever came without worrying about mistakes or judging the results, so that I got used to the scale. Then the next day I recorded both solos: five hours of playing, many, many takes and more finger blisters. I’m pleased with how they turned out, especially the second solo.
There is only one lead guitar part through the whole song, even though it sounds different in the verses, solos and through the breakdown. In the imaginary band that’s playing the song, the guitarist is switching the sound of the guitar for each section.
All the lead guitar parts are played on my Epiphone Dot, using the bridge humbucker pickup, through Scuffham Lab’s S-Gear guitar amp modelling plugin.
That Bass
There are bass parts that are routine, easy, not very demanding. And then there are bass parts that are just a whole load of fun to play. This is definitely fun even though it’s not flashy nor fancy. I spent an afternoon on it, tweaking the way it moves from one chord to another, fitting it in with the kick drum and finding the right pattern for the breakdown (the middle section of the song, where the bass and the organ take centre stage).
I ended up recording it three times in full; the first one was fine, the second was because I was really getting into playing it and thought I could do a better job, and the last was to switch to playing with a pick to get those crisp notes that show up well in the breakdown. Some part of me will always be a bass player at heart, and it’s the instrument I’m happiest with on the rare occasions I play live.
Those Drums
This is the second mothershout track where I played (rather than programmed) the drums, using a finger drumming pad. The drum part on Tell Me was quite simple and repetitive. This is faster, more complicated and took a lot more practice. The big advantage of playing is that I get a drum part with way more feel and realism than if I programmed it. It’s definitely worth the effort.
The kick drum pattern changes from the verses to the choruses, and the drum fills are much more varied than in Tell Me. The most difficult part to get right was the breakdown, where during the first half (before the vocals come back in), each of the four chords is over a slightly different drum part. Any decent drummer would think this is all pretty simple. I am not a decent drummer, and also decided to challenge myself to get at least one take played all the way through, without mistakes. I managed it, but I lost count of the number of tries it took. What you hear on the track is 99% played by me, with some minor edits and timing corrections.
The Music Theory Bit
Harmony
The chords I chose are not very complicated, but thought went into that choice. The song is in C minor (chosen to fit the singers’ vocal ranges) and the scale is C natural minor. The verse chords are the first and sixth chords of the scale: Cm and A♭M7. The chorus starts on the fourth chord, Fm7, and moves back to the sixth again, A♭M7. Both B♭ and Gm7 show up as passing chords.
A Cm chord is C, E♭ and G. Put an A♭ under that and you get A♭, C, E♭ and G, which is A♭M7. Then change that G to F and you get F, A♭, C and E♭, which is Fm7. In other words, the first, fourth and sixth chords of this C natural minor scale all share at least two notes and this song moves between them, mostly by just changing the bass notes.
Moving to Fm (F A♭ C) in the chorus is a straightforward up-to-the-fourth chord movement, found in hundreds of pop songs. It’s an old trick, but a good one; moving to the fourth chord of the key adds tension. Then moving between the fourth and sixth doesn’t release all that tension, until we finally resolve back to Cm again at the end of each chorus.
In the breakdown, the chords are Cm, Gm, Fm and A♭M7, all over a C bass. These chords all share notes, and where the notes aren’t shared, they descend nicely in lines, so there’s a sense of the chord progression moving somewhere. The organ part decorates each chord by changing one note halfway through, to add extra movement and interest.
The very last chord is a Cm(9) - C D E♭ G - the D is the ninth. I love added-ninth chords where the ninth is right in between the root and the third; deliciously dissonant. The voices sing those three notes C, D and E♭ on the last word, need, and the lead guitar ends on a nicely unresolved D.
Melody
I didn’t consciously write the vocal melody (I woke up one morning with most of it already in my head) but that doesn’t mean I can’t figure out how it works. A good melody will often repeat a phrase or a pattern, to let the listener learn and recognize it. The verse melody is three lines, and they all have the same descending pattern. For the first two lines, the descent is from the fifth of the chord to the third. On the last line the chord changes, but the melody uses the same notes, which now descend from the major seventh of the chord to the fifth. I really like that trick of changing the chord but keeping the melody the same; in fact, in this case it’s really only the bass note that moves from C to A♭, but that’s enough to change the harmony.
There are, of course, two vocal lines. The upper one is the original melody, and the lower one harmonizes; mostly a third or a fourth below the upper, but tweaked to try and make both vocal lines work as independent melodies.
There are people who study this kind of counterpoint (writing of multiple melodies that go together) for fun, and treat it as a kind of mental exercise. I find it equal parts wonderful (when the vocal lines fit elegantly together) and frustrating (when I have to rework one voice part to make room for another). But if it wasn’t frustrating, it wouldn’t be fun. Or so I tell myself.
In the breakdown section, the chords and the bassline change but the vocal lines in the third verse stay the same. They’re the same notes, but they relate differently to those different chords, which I think makes that whole section more interesting. It feels like two melodies for the price of one, though all I’ve really done is sell you the same melody twice.
The chorus melody starts with the top line leaping up to that long I note on C, the fifth note of Fm. Then it descends to E♭, which would be the minor seventh of Fm7, but at the same time it gets there, the chord underneath changes, so that E♭ note becomes the fifth of A♭M7. The descending pattern is roughly similar to the verse; more repetition. The last little melody for is this what I want, or what I need is two short phrases, where the second phrase is an inversion of the first.
To get even more musically geeky, the melody doesn’t resolve and stay on the root note of a chord (or the tonic note of the key) until the end of a section, which I think keeps the melody that bit more interesting.
Bass
The bass part is built around different ways of approaching the root note of a chord. The basslines under Cm and Fm move up through the fifth and seventh to the root. Under A♭M7, the bass starts on the root and jumps up to the fifth and back down. All very simple, but I think it’s effective; the fancier stuff is under the chord changes. For example, when the chords change from Fm to A♭M7 via Gm7, the bass plays G E♭ A♭ - the E♭ bridges the Gm7 and A♭M7. And when the chorus starts with an Fm chord, I always move up from C to F on the bass, which helps the whole song feels like it’s moving up.
In the breakdown the bass is playing a descending C minor pentatonic scale, which lands on C on a strong beat, emphasising that note to help establish that the chords all have a C in the bass.
That Rhythm Guitar Riff
It’s based on a simple Am chord (x0221x), then you lift two fingers to play open strings (x0200x), then you put them back. For the second part of the riff, you switch to F/C, which is x3321x, and repeat the lifting off and putting back. Technically that’s Am, Am7sus2 and F/C, F(sus2, #11)/C, but it’s just an easy little finger thing. This is the start of it, in tabulature form:
The track’s in Cm, so I transposed the part by putting a capo on the guitar at the third fret. As I recorded it, I worked out that I could bring in the top E string at times (which is a G when the capo is on), turning the second chord into a rather gorgeous A♭M7/E♭.
It’s played with a fingerstyle chord technique, which is a fancy way of saying that I use my fingers to pick all the notes of the chord at the same time (alternating with my thumb on the bass notes). This is different to strumming; no matter how fast you strum a chord, the strings are hit at slightly different times and that “blurs” the sound. In this song, I wanted the very precise timing of the fingerstyle technique. Also, I find it a lot easier than using strumming and palm-muting at 170bpm.
The Art
I started with a photograph of the Alberta highway I mentioned up above, and fed it to an AI as a basis for a set of more abstract images. I like the way it fits the title, and frankly I couldn’t come up with an image idea for the overall meaning of the song.
The End
That’s it. If you don’t like the song, that’s okay. But if you do, feel free to share this post and/or the song with others. Because I write music for the fun of it, and part of that fun is sharing.
Notice how I blame the song and not myself in a poor attempt to feel better about it.
Arguably, all I ever do is mess around on musical instruments. I do not see this as a problem.
To be fair to Mr Anderson, he has pointed out that he treats the sound of the words as just another instrument in the band. Which I suppose is kinda liberating.
From John Taylor’s In The Pleasure Groove, chapter 16.
There are, of course, all sorts of versions of this rule. I based this on the explanation in Bobby Owsinski’s The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook: 5th Edition.
Some people call these licks but I can’t take that term seriously.