Wild Light Decade #11: Long Time Coming - with key change (Patreon)

You have found: Another old mp3 by 65daysofstatic. Equipping this mp3 will alter your stats as follows:

Melodrama: +10
Nuance: -30
Bombast: +23
Stamina: -15
Prog: +60
Special traits: constant exhaustion, existential dread, Steinman-fingers.

You can choose to:

[1. Equip]
[2. Leave Well Alone]

...You pick [1. Equip]. Your heart sinks, but your ears soften and pucker, ready to receive new sonic mysteries from your favourite and increasingly strange weird noise band...

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Hi there, friends! Another week. Another glimpse into the abyss. We’re a good way into the journey now. The Wild Light tour is less than FIVE WEEKS away. (Tickets still available, should you still need them. Don’t wait too long!) Which means, well… at least that many more drops for the Wild Light Decade project. Although perhaps we’ll go a little while longer. There’s still a fair amount of skeletons littering this dig site. Would be a shame for their failed legacies to be lost forever…

This week’s idea hung around for a good long while. In hindsight, we should have sold this chord progression and melody to Coldplay and had done with it. They’d have slowed it down a little, taken out most of the notes, plastered some hopeful, vague lyrics on top and then filled stadiums with it. Oh well. You live and you learn.

This song features a tactic that is oft discussed and is a constant source of tension at 65HQ: ‘Snare on the one’. We don't mean this in a hardcore blast-beat sense, more like in a bar-length drum pattern sense. When deployed properly, it is a great tool for creating that sense of urgency 65 strive for in all songs. This is how you do it: hit the snare drum on ‘one’ every bar. And then optionally at other times too. Here are some examples of some well-deployed ‘snare on the one’ strategies:

• James - Tomorrow 
• Coldplay - Clocks 
• 65daysofstatic - Safe Passage 
• 65daysofstatic - Tiger Girl 
• Pixies - Bone Machine 
• ...Trail of Dead - Days of Being Wild 
• The Supremes - Stop! In the Name of Love 
• David Bowie - Rebel Rebel 

Look, nobody is more surprised than us to see an apologia for Coldplay emanating from 65LABS, so never let it be said that 65 do not give credit where it is due. Any well-crafted snare-on-the-one is a small piece of pop music magic. But the main point here is that Tomorrow by James is an absolute banger of a tune and if you’ve not listened to it for a while, you definitely should. 

And so to Long Time Coming… It seems like what we were trying to write was our own version of Tomorrow, right? Big, bold chord progression that hits you in the ribs and heart, soaring melodies, etc. etc.

Not sure exactly where this particular demo falls in our overall plight of trying to write this song. It doesn’t waste any time introducing some unique (although kind of weird) sound design, and the bass line gets going pretty quickly too. But the technique of introducing a new element at the start of each phrase gets quite boring quite quickly and for some reason the first snare doesn’t happen until over a minute in.

Once it does, everything lifts immediately. If the song had just started there, maybe we’d have gotten something exciting on our hands. Then it races along for a while just doing its thing. With some attention to detail and allowing some space for the melody and movement to breathe, it could have perhaps held its own. But everything is just hammering at full tilt and then it tumbles into a nice descend which suffers from the same problem.

This maximalist approach to composition can be observed at various levels of 65’s approach to songwriting. To paraphrase an old 65 song: it is a thing we find very difficult to unlearn. This whole Wild Light Decade project gives some idea of the churn that went into producing the eight tracks on the record at the macro level of our involuntary, maximalist composition. And Long Time Coming demonstrates it at the micro level of individual parts: why play one note when you can squeeze in ten?

And so what we ended up with was another song that was suffocated by the too-many-ideas we necessarily threw at it to bring it to life in the first place. Savage nature indeed…

Also attached as a download is a different version: Long Time Coming - slow alt. version. This is included more in an effort to demonstrate the Wild Light writing process than as a cohesive listen. All the programming removed, reinstrumented, just the four of us trying to tune into whatever latent power this particular combination of notes held. It is a bit of a frustrating listen to be honest, because it feels like there is something hidden in there that we were never quite able to tease out.

That’s it for now.

See you next week!

65.x