Civil Twilight

"Civil twilight radiates the void."

Most songs serve one of three functions. They can either be

1. a portrait
2. a metaphor, or
3. a statement

"Civil Twilight,"the first song from the Candelabra Sessions, is a portrait of the period of time between sunset and when the sun is six degrees below the horizon. It usually lasts about thirty minutes. In most cases, artificial light is not needed to carry out normal outdoor activites during this time.

During my Easter vaction (in which my wife and I visited Savannah and Tybee Island on the South Eastern corner of Georgia) I took a picture of this sign. It happened to be during civil twilight...or, in layman's terms, it was dusk.

Also, over the past year, I have been reading a tremendously beautiful and tragically disgusting book by Chuck Palahniuk called Haunted. Of course, there's a story in the book called "Civil Twilight." This tale addresses the need for people to believe in a monster in order for them to be afraid of it. In the story, an invisible monster kills people during dusk. But, because no one can see it, no one believes it's really there.

With songwriting, everything comes from somewhere. I never know what's going to set me off and inspire me to create. One thing that I like to do is to reflect on what I read, what I watch, and to what I listen. In the case of reading this story, I proceeded to write down some thoughts and feelings I immediately had at it's conclusion. I read this story a few times and wrote different things at the close of it. That saying about art not being created in a vacuum...well, that's pretty much 100% true. It's important that you create your own idea from the inspiration, though. Palahniuk's story inspired the thoughts that inspired this song. Make sense?

Lyrically, I attempted to create a portrait of things that typically go through my mind at any given sunset. Why are we here? Where do we go after this? Is there some reality being presented to me on a daily basis that I haven't deciphered as of yet? What does this mean? That's the gist of the song.

In terms of the music, I wanted to write a song that used some major 7th chords. A lot of jazz compositions have complex chords. I've been soaking in complex records for the past year and I figured it was only a matter of time before these things found there way in to my writing. To understand what a major 7th chord is, go find a piano. Play middle C with the major 3rd (E), the major 5th (G), and then the major 7th (B). They're all white keys with one white key dividing them. It's a fuller sounding chord than the standard major chord, which is composed of the 1-3-5 without the 7.

Major 7th chords and really distorted guitars don't really go well together. The more distorted a guitar is, the more the complexity of the chord is masked. At a guitar's most distorted, even the most complex chord will convey just a root note.

To make a major 7th chord work, you have to dial in your tone just right. If you don't, you'll have a bunch of mud on your hands.

The main riff for this song was tripled. There's a hard pan to the left of a somewhat distorted guitar. There's a hard pan to the right of a slightly more distorted (but different) guitar. Then, the individual riff was divided. I used a fuzz pedal on the single notes and then a dreamy shimmering effect on the major 7th chords. This gives us a full picture of the riff without it having to sound too limp.

I like to write big choruses sometimes. For this song, I opted to write a big bridge. You don't see those too often. They're almost counter intuitive, but if you accentuate them the right way they can work. Because I had four guitar tracks going already, I just played the big chords during the bridge. When all of the guitars are nearly independent until this one part, it makes for quite a drama; noise.

The guitar solo on this is a bit rediculous, I know. I couldn't resist. If someone else ever produces this track, this will probably get cut out. It was fun to put this solo together. Note how the EQ on the lead guitars is quite different from the rhythm guitars. This is where using EQ can come in handy. For the rhythm guitars throughout the song, I stuck to the Marshall's natural distorted tone (no fuzz boxes, no pedals). Then, once the need to differentiate the tones became necessary, I pulled out the fuzz boxes.

You're probably wondering who's playing drums on this track (and all of these tracks for that matter). The drum patterns come from discrete drums (www.discretedrums.com). The guy who thought of this was brilliant. In stead of just providing loops, the recordists for this project recorded each drum on individual tracks. In effect, you get pretty close to what you'd get in studio if you had a drummer come down and play. In practice, you save money. Each kit costs about $350 and is worth every penny. All of the patterns are fully licensed--that's why they cost so much. I should mention that the drummer was Chris McHugh and the percussion ist was Eric Darken.

The bass on this track is me, too. For my demos, I like to play a very basic bass line. That way, if for some reason a more sophisticated player comes in to play on the song at a later date, none of my prescribed motifs are locked into anything.

Mixing this track wasn't too much of a challenge. I did do some touch ups yesterday and today after I gave my ears a break from mixing five songs in a row. The only changes I made were muting some of the amp buzz and bringing the overhead mics down about 6 dB in the verses.

I also mastered the track for mp3. This just meant bringing the overall level up so that the average volume was around -10 dB. Also, I did some slight EQ. All in all, it's a moderately bright track, but not as bright as some songs.

So, I hope you've enjoyed reading about my writing process. As I mentioned in a previous post, there are a number of reasons why I've chosen to open my studio doors and let you all take a peak at what goes on in here.

Rock on, my friends.
You may download this song by clicking here.