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Multi-Track Recordings
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Dreamland ( © 1983 Jeffrey S. Smith )
"This song was a little throw-away that I wrote one day, during my junior year of High School in Ann Arbor. It was a rainy March day and I was sitting in a practice room during a free period, wishing for sun and warm weather. I started daydreaming on the keyboard, and pretty soon... I had this tune called Dreamland. I thought it was cute, but nothing fancy. My father, however, declared it his favourite song of mine (out of 70+), thus I had to include it on the tape. Fortunately, my engineer heard something missing that I'd never thought of, and suggested the bell-tones high above everything else, and for the first time... I like it too." |
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Music of the Night
"At the time I made this demo, Andrew Lloyd Weber's Phantom of the Opera was all the rage, and I was as caught up in it as anyone, having bought the CD and memorized it months earlier. I thought it would be nice to do one of the tunes from the show, but there were a couple stumbling blocks; first, I wanted to sing "Music of the Night", sung on the CD by Michael Crawford, but he's a baritone and I, a first tenor. Secondly, I was the sole musician in this recording session, and I'd never played the song myself, let alone practiced it. So, I set out to turbo-learn it, and the initial piano track had to be re-recorded several times before I got it right, but in the end, it didn't turn out too terrible. |
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(I'll) Come Back Around ( © 1989 Jeffrey S. Smith )
"This was the only song from my initial demo attempt with Jim that got re-recorded this time around. On my first attempt, my harmonies hadn't gelled in my head yet, and it came off sounding rather wretched. Since then, I'd re-sung the harmonies enough to feel comfortable doing them, so this song became the only song with vocal backup tracks (sung by me) as well as multiple intrumental tracks. The song itself was written in the late 1980's, when my social life was at an all-time low, and I was floundering, trying to figure out what to do with my life, so I wrote about that directionless feeling, and incorporated a bit of the isolation I was experiencing into it. The result it... non-traditional, but worthwhile in retrospect." |
