Creating The Future Alone

This song goes back a long time and until very recently, I thought it was the oldest "good" song I'd written (I wrote plenty of others, they just sucked). There are actually two songs older than this one: We Were Free, which was the very first single ever released by Storm of Crows (though Paul didn't play on it), and What I Need, which will be coming up later in this blog series. Still, it's a song I've loved from the moment I wrote it, because I knew it was different. It had something. In my arrogant, spotty youth, I thought it was the song that would make me famous.

Date Conceived - 8th April 2001 

I don't remember much of writing the lyrics, except that it was then as it is now; I hated having to do it, and just wrote a bunch of vague nonsense that sounded like it fit a theme. I do remember that originally I inexplicably included the word "now" at the end of every single line. Thank goodness I had the sense to cut that out. Also, the lyric 'we're in for nasty weather' didn't sit with me well then, just as it doesn't now. It was a placeholder lyric that I never swapped out. It's quite a cliche though.

As well as playing in my second band, Second Storm, with Jimmy (from Storm of Crows), I was training as a sound engineer around the time I wrote The Future Alone. I cobbled together a very budget setup, and me and Jimmy set about recording a few of the songs in our repertoire. I was very proud of the version of The Future Alone at the time, but now when I listen back I can spot everythnig I'd change (the list is too long to include). That band never went anywhere and after it started doing that, I pretty much put down the guitar for almost two decades.

Lockdown Version - 7th July 2020 

Like most other people, I found myself with a lot of time and nothing to do when lockdown came in 2020. I decided to get myself a basic recording setup and see if I could put down "the definitive version" of some of the old songs from my band days. Some of them were very good, and I thought they deserved a proper outing. The Future Alone was the first song I attempted. While I was recording the audio, I also filmed myself so I could put together one of those trendy lockdown videos with all the parts on the screen at the same time. I put it out on YouTube, shared it on Facebook, and some of my friends even said "Wow!"

Embiggened by the response I set to work on the second song, You Decide (which Storm of Crows later did an even more definitiver version of) but I decided I needed help, so I asked Jimmy if he wanted to come back on bass, and he did. When the video for that went out, Paul (who was in our first ever band in 1996, West Tangleyam) saw it and said he'd be interested in joining us too, so Storm of Crows was born.

Storm of Crows Version - 6th July 2021 

When we decided to make an album we agreed to write four songs each. I don't often welcome the prospect of writing new songs so my immediate thought was to harvest what I could from the past, as we'd already done that for a few singles. I decided The Future Alone was to be one of mine, so I put together a guide track. I even got as far as getting Jimmy to record backing vocals and bass (as he always had on the song in our Second Storm days) but I was not at all comfortable with my vocals.

I decided to try pitching the song up to D, and recorded an acoustic part for the song, but I wasn't any happier with how it sounded in the new key. At this point I started wondered if the song maybe wasn't as good as I thought all these years, and cast it aside once more.

Final Version - 2nd March 2023

I finally broke ground on this track by recording all the vocal parts (the main line, plus three harmonies for the choruses) in one mammoth session on the 2nd March 2023, and the bass the following day, having retained the acoustic part from two years earlier. Storm of Crows was still active at this point, so I'm not actually sure what I was thinking. Perhaps I wanted to see if it was still a viable song and could go on our second album.

The lead guitar and harmonies followed a weak later, as I was adapting to the new key. It's a bit tricky taking a lead part written in A and moving it up to D (well, it was for me), but I wanted to play the solo exactly the same as I'd written it decades before. Once that was recorded, the song was done, as I'd recreated all the parts it had, but I thought I could add more, so included an overdrive guitar rhythm part and a hammond organ as well.

Finally, on the 22nd June 2023 this song, which began life twenty-two years, two months, and fifteen days earlier, was finished. And though it was at the time, it wouldn't remain as the song with the longest duration between inception and completion.