Creating Your Place in Time

Your Place in Time - 10th December 2024

Your Place in Time is another song from the album where its origin can be traced back over two decades (thinking about it, I'll be slightly screwed when that well finally runs dry). It's not one from my song book as that was typically for songs that were completed, but before clouds became a thing (virtual clouds, not actual clouds. I'm not that old), I also kept notes on my computer.

Band-wise, I try to be quite organised. Any time I was in a band, I'd keep a folder on my computer with the band's name and in it, files of all the songs we played (with chords), the ones we'd written, the covers we performed, and songs in various states of being written. Your Place in Time had two verses and a chorus, so it could be found under Second Storm\Working Songs\Your Place in Time.txt. It's still there actually. Different computer, same folder, with a date and time of 11/12/2001 00:06 (I was apparently up late that night).

As you can see, what's written doesn't differ greatly from the finished version of the song. I mostly changed things around so it scanned better (and I did also drop the key from F to D). The main change with the lyrics is in the second verse with the line:

You got a head full of magic and nothing in your hand

Anyone overly familiar with my music (so just me, most likely!) will recognise this from track one of the Storm of Crows album Twenty-Five Years, Second Storm (recognise that name, too? When we decide not to use the name Second Storm for the band, I rushed off to turn it into a song instead). That line had been sitting in my notebook for a long time, and it found its way there at some point in the nineties when my cousin Mark (who also happened to be my first band's first drummer) uttered it one night while we were playing cards. Also, on the second and fourth lines here I very cleverly rhymed "out" with "out" so that had to change.

The first two lines of the chorus weren't terrible. They just weren't good either. I've studied writing between then and now so bad writing irks me and I try to avoid clichés like the plague, so they had to go as well. Picking up on the theme of a break up, I tried to get back into the narrative I'd begun twenty-three years earlier, despite now just as then, still never having been through a breakup. Adding the third verse wasn't too much of a chore, but the rest was a different beast.

The middle 8 went through so many iterations in such a short period of time I really couldn't describe them all accurately even if I wanted to (and actually I do want to). I do remember at the start I had one particular idea so ended up writing quite a lot for it, only to change my mind to think that something shorter would be better, and  I could leave time for a guitar solo. I then edited it down but accidentally lost the parts I took out. Unfortunately I then changed it back to something longer and had to try to remember what I'd cut. One version was where the middle 8 was sung more slowly, and in another it was faster. You'll notice that the final version is sung slowly for the first four lines, then quickly for the next four, and back to slowly for the final two. I do remember working all of this out on the plane to Norway for Christmas 2024. I got it done a few minutes before we landed and then I could switch off and enjoy the holiday.

This did all leave me with another question: where would I put the guitar solo? Having a song without one was out of the question, but the idea of slotting guitar parts into the short breaks near the end of the song didn't sit right with me, but I had this nagging idea at the back of my mind that it might work if it was a bass solo instead.

I didn't have a huge amount of time to fill. There are six mini breaks and I'm playing for two to three beats in each break but still, I'm not a bass player. I started noodling and eventually came up with some ideas and started recording. I selected two bars around the area I wanted and set it on loop, recording each piece around twenty times, and invariably getting slightly better on each take. I still had to comp each one together, and for some I even had to physically move notes forwards or backwards so the timing was right as I just couldn't play it. I was equally useless at the slap bass part, and ended up muting the strings I didn't need, and playing it with my fingertips, palm down over the strings. It looked ridiculous and wasn't a practical way to play, but it worked.

The other challenge was the fact that the song starts very quietly and finishes very loudly. This meant I ruined quite a few vocal takes as I had to set the microphone sensitivity quite high to pick up my quieter singing, but it clipped for the second half of the song. I ended up having to re-record the middle 8 onwards. I also decided to start the song with no effects on the vocal or guitar for a totally stripped back performance, but as the song starts to build, so do the effects. When the bass first plays, there's a hint of reverb on the instruments and as the track builds to the middle 8, the reverb and delay builds too.

All in all the song took me 32 days to record from start to finish, which might sound impressive until you remember that the Beatles recorded their entire first album in fourteen hours. Usually I start a song and it will be a few months from start to finish so for me, this was a very fast one (ignoring the fact I started writing it twenty-three years earlier).