A Cold Freezin' Night: "it was a pleasure to burn" production diary

Things have just about wrapped up around the studio. The last chord has been strummed, the last MIDI part tinkered with, the last microphone tucked away. People in bland khaki uniforms are sweeping the floors and carrying out the trash in the reserved, honorable silence of their profession. I've crafted a neat little lyrics booklet to include in the album download and given the mixes those final tweaks.

But I have one more story to tell you, about a weird, weird song and the Gift of Music.


A cold freezin' night
I wish I was a boy
A cold freezin' night
Oh, baby

Why do you always get away with things?
It's not fair
I need to think, think of something
So you can stay alive
I can kill you with a rifle, with a shotgun, if I care
Probably by cut all your your toes off
Make my way up from there

A cold freezin' night
I wish I was a boy
A cold freezin' night
Oh, baby

Boys do tougher than girls
And I wish I was a boy
I'm gonna rip all your hair off
And everybody's gonna think
He is an asshole
He is that asshole
I'm gonna all rip your hair off
An' then you're gonna be

A cold freezin' night
I wish I was a boy
A cold freezin' night
Oh, baby, sing with me

A cold freezing night
I believe I can soar
A cold freezing night
I believe

I usually like to include a someone else's song on an album. There's so much great songwriting out there, and I always enjoy a good cover. And what makes a good cover is the same thing that makes a good movie adaptation: bringing something new to the table, engaging the original work in a way that sheds light on it a different angle. To wit, here's The Books' original composition:

Yup, totally different, but there are some key common touchstones. To explain, I feel I have to rewind all the way to this past December/January to the Gift of Music, which is a wonderful tradition over at Song Fight!. Each winter holiday season, any one who likes signs up by offering three different songs that they'd like to see covered. The potential cover songs are distributed more or less randomly and each participant picks one song to cover (or more, if they really want). Et voilà: a new album's worth of music with some of the most interesting twists on both your favorite songs and tunes you've never heard of.

I will admit, my list was... challenging. I finally settled on The Books' deliriously post-modern mash-up because the words tickle my feminist bones. But this is where my ideals about a good cover song come into play. I feel that core of the song, the melody, should be respected as well as the lyrics, but the rest can be - should be - changed.

So what do you do with a song that has no melody?

You make one up, of course! The Books are big about sampling and recombination, so I felt it was justified to plunder their "lyrics" and reconstitute a song that was more my style. Thus was born the melodic center of what you hear today, and that was pretty much it for my submission to G.o.M. I like the minimal percussion, the 180 take of giving the whole composition a melody, and I like the vocal harmonies of the chorus.

But I wasn't really satisfied. The song didn't go anywhere, and it just kind of... well, stopped. To create more energy and variation, I thought about a solo or a bridge. Yet, this past Sunday, sitting in front of my mixing board, I had an epiphany: this is a sampling song! Forgetting about any guitar noodling or a key change, I headed to my favorite audio junkyard, SampleSwap and sifted through the wonderful disjecta there, bringing home the rattling tin cans, PVC pipes and whirly, wispy bits of noise you hear. The new mix is much improved, with a clearer nod to its sampled, post-modern roots. It's also the perfect final track with its disregard of the fourth wall and distinct sonic approach, leaning against the back wall of the party, cooly sipping its Pabst Blue Ribbon, nodding at its brooding half-sister Soul Clap and thinking "it was a pleasure to burn."