#track-by-track

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'Boys For Pele' - 25th Anniversary Tack-By-Track Review

‘Boys For Pele’ – 25th Anniversary Tack-By-Track Review

Hearing this album again, after several years of not listening to it, its beauty, ingenuity, and impact has not diminished.  Its original release was at a time in my life when I was struggling with my identity and direction, and it provided reassurance that I knew what I liked was ‘me’, and to be confident in my tastes and choices.  It will always remain in my heart. An album of this length from…

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[carygrace]

Lady of Turquoise, track-by-track, day twelve: “The Land of Two Fields”

December 12th, 2019 Lady of Turquoise, Disc 2, Track 5 “The Land of Two Fields” (Instrumental. Music by Cary Grace and John Garden.)

Credits: Cary Grace: synthesizers John Garden: synthesizer (Prophet 5) Graham Clark: guitar

Notes: This is a short-and-sweet little thing I put together on my own, based on the beginning of the jam track which became “Lady of Turquoise”.

The original jam had a little bit of a shaky start, if I recall correctly (as jams often do), and the band kind of stopped and started again, but John played some really nice leads on the Prophet 5 in that first section that were too good to discard. So, I kept John’s synth lead parts, and added some nice Eventide delay to them.

I took everything else (guitars, bass, drums) out, and constructed an electronic backing track around the P5 lines. Then I added some Minimoog lead (because, Minimoog), and Graham Clark put some guitar on it later on when he was visiting me.

It wasn’t quite as simple to do as I have made it sound, because we pretty much never record to a click track or a fixed tempo (I tend towards the opinion that non-electronic music played live is better when the tempo can breathe and float a bit). I made it work in the end though.

In fact, it worked out well enough that I don’t think anyone would have been able to tell that it was constructed in the opposite order from what convention would dictate, but now I’ve told you, so the secret is out.

The title, like the lyrical idea for the following track, comes from ancient Egyptian mythology.

Listen: https://carygrace.bandcamp.com/track/the-land-of-two-fields

[carygrace]

Lady of Turquoise, track-by-track, day eleven: “Castle of Dreams”

December 11th, 2019 Lady of Turquoise, Disc 2, Track 4 “Castle of Dreams” (Lyrics by Cary Grace. Music by Budge, Garden, Grace, Lewry, Payne.)

Credits: 

Cary Grace: vocals Steffe Sharpstrings: lead guitar John Garden: electric guitar, synthesizer Andy Budge: bass David Payne: drums

Notes:

A track in three parts, which I call “Nephilim”, “City at the End”, and “On Cimmerian Shore”.

This one was recorded at the same session with Steffe that produced a significant portion of Tygerland, but I thought that it didn’t quite fit on Tygerland, so I set it aside for a different album. I’m glad I did, because I think it works perfectly here!

Listen: https://carygrace.bandcamp.com/track/castle-of-dreams

[carygrace]

Lady of Turquoise, track-by-track, day ten: “Memory”

December 10th, 2019 Lady of Turquoise, Disc 2, Track 3 “Memory”

(Lyrics by Cary Grace. Music by Budge, Garden, Grace, Payne.)

Credits: Cary Grace: vocals, organ, strings John Garden: electric guitar Andy Budge: bass David Payne: drums

When we recorded the basic tracks for this, John immediately asked to overdub a guitar solo, saying it needed something like “a big Matt Bellamy sort of guitar solo”, which I guess is pretty accurate!

It took me a while to start writing the lyrics for this one, but when inspiration came to me, the writing went quickly; I wrote them in around ten minutes once I had the idea. 

By way of full disclosure, I borrowed the title from an obscure H.P. Lovecraft short story, and the first two lines are a paraphrased from the text. Here it is if you don’t know it: http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/m.aspx

Listen: https://carygrace.bandcamp.com/track/memory

[carygrace]

Lady of Turquoise, track-by-track, day seven: “Costume Jewellery (Extended Version)”

December 7th, 2019 Lady of Turquoise, Track 7 “Costume Jewellery (Extended Version)” (Lyrics by Cary Grace. Music by Budge, Clark, Garden, Grace, Payne.) 

Credits: Cary Grace: vocals, acoustic guitar, synthesizers John Garden: electric guitar  Graham Clark: electric violin Andy Bole: laouto, bouzouki  Andy Budge: bass David Payne: drums 

Notes:  It’s Friday—the end of the work week for some—but more importantly (to me, anyway), we have already reached day seven of my track-by-track blog post series on Lady of Turquoise, and this will be the final instalment from Disc One.

Here, the band expounds on one of my songs with an extended instrumental section, of which the finished vibe reminds me a bit of the Velvet Underground, but if they were somehow infused with the consciousnesses of various Krautrock bands from the ‘70s, and put in a room full of synthesizers, where all the knobs had been secretly covered in LSD. 

Speaking of synthesizers, I guess I kind of threw the kitchen sink at this one. There’s Minimoog, VCS3, Pro-One…far too many synth tracks, really, but if you’re going to go, why not go too far? 

After the first two verses, the mood becomes introspective, and the relentless drive of toms played with soft mallets propels the listener through undulating curtains of analogue drones, as fragments of sequences flutter by. Eventually, the listener comes in for a landing for verse three, having had sufficient time and space floating around out there to contemplate the story so far. 

Exotic stringed things by Andy Bole (Shankara, UKKO), and electric violin by the fantastic Graham Clark (Magick Brothers, Gong). 

Tomorrow we start Disc Two—don’t be late!

Listen: https://carygrace.bandcamp.com/track/costume-jewellery-extended-version

[carygrace]

Lady of Turquoise, track-by-track, day four: “Into Dust”

December 4th, 2019 Lady of Turquoise, Track 4 “Into Dust” (Lyrics by Cary Grace. Music by Budge, Garden, Grace, Payne.)

Credits:  Cary Grace: vocals, organ John Garden: electric guitar Andy Budge: bass David Payne: drums

Notes: (Ah, such an appropriate track for my birthday! Another year closer to returning to the dust from whence I came...)

In the recording session, this one immediately followed “Without a Trace”, as did the track after it (in reality, this one and the next one are kind of one composite piece, because they flow into each other, but I split it into tracks for the CD—I would suggest listening to both of them all the way through for the full effect tomorrow night when “Afterglow” has been unveiled). 

I recall from the session that John’s guitar on this “trilogy” was going through a completely over-the-top chain of multiple distortion pedals, which were all turned on at once. The pedal board he had was crammed almost entirely full of various fuzz and overdrive pedals—and of course there was a wah pedal on there too, because you’ve got to have one of those. 

Never seen anything like it before or since, but I do love the guitar sound.

I wrote the lyrics later, recorded vocals, added the organ, and added the bells in the middle section.

Listen: https://carygrace.bandcamp.com/track/into-dust

[carygrace]

Lady of Turquoise, track-by-track, day three: “Without a Trace” (full-length album version)

December 3rd, 2019 Lady of Turquoise, Track 3 “Without a Trace” (Lyrics by Cary Grace. Music by Budge, Garden, Grace, Payne. String arrangement by Steve Everitt.)

Credits: 

Cary Grace: vocals John Garden: electric guitar Victoria Reyes: piano, organ, backing vocals Steve Everitt: strings, electric guitar Andy Budge: bass David Payne: drums

Notes:

This is the second song on the album that began life as a spontaneous jam. I tightened up the structure a bit, but much of what you hear instrumentally happened in the moment, in one take. The inspiration for the lyrics came to me much later, in a flash, the night of the day the great David Bowie left us (I am still all broken up about that). It is very much my lyrical tribute to him. It is fortunate that I had waterproof ink in my fountain pen when I wrote those words, because tears of grief were shed in the process. 

I don’t usually discuss the thought processes I went through when I wrote my lyrics, simply because I want the listener to interpret the words on their own, as they see fit, without any influence from me. So I went back and forth on whether to tell you all about the above, but I decided to do so without going into any actual detail about the lyrics themselves, because it was a really important emotional and creative moment for me that bears sharing, and is part of what makes the song special to me.

Victoria Reyes played the lovely piano and organ, and sang the haunting backing vocals.

Steve Everitt (Eat Static) provided the beautiful string arrangement, as well as an additional guitar solo in the last instrumental break—both of which, in my assessment, took the arrangement up several levels from what it would have been without them. 

I’ve been performing “Without a Trace” live with the band for some time now, and an edited (shortened) version has already been released as a single, but in addition to being un-edited and including the complete instrumental sections, this is a different mix (I think I’ve really improved it since the single release), and also has been mastered to fit in with the rest of the album. Hope you all enjoy hearing it again in a slightly different way.

Listen:

https://carygrace.bandcamp.com/track/without-a-trace