Demo: Seculare (Eliza Gilkyson) (Patreon)

I think most of you know that Jim Henry and I offer a one-hour livestream concert on YouTube the last Tuesday of every month. Each one has a theme, and in November we chose "Songs We Wish We'd Written." I pulled out the following gems:

Wisteria (Richard Shindell)

The Mountain (Dave Carter)

No Choice (Buddy Mondlock)

Stumpy's Last Dance (Frank Tedesso)

Seculare (Eliza Gilkyson)

For me, the selections weren't so much about the songs themselves but the places a writer must go to get them. What I long for, more than any particular result, is the key to that kingdom where I imagine wild metaphor, spirituality, compassionate seeing, robust language, and the occasional whiff of humor all coalesce into vibrant, true stories and indelible melodies and chord progressions. I am a long way from arriving or achieving that sort of access, but I recognize songwriters who live in deep poetic realms and they are my songwriting heroes.

A few years ago, when the album Secularia came out, Eliza hired Jim Henry and me to back her for a run of album release shows and festivals. The songs, which she called "agnostic hymns," deserved a reverent treatment and we found an extraordinary pairing in Jim Henry's electric guitar and a viola I'd rented from a local shop. The song "Seculare" brought me to tears every night. After the livestream this week, I wanted to record a solo version just to see how it would feel. I also had something I wanted to try in the studio -- recording guitar and vocal together, with the SM7B on the vocal and a single ribbon mic on Willow, my Urlacher parlor guitar. 

The demo here is what I came up with. What I can say is this: I am happy with the performance, because in it is every ounce of reverence I have for this song. But my studio technique didn't work, quite, as there was significant bleed between guitar and vocal. My first mix was very "mono" sounding, with the voice and instruments all in the center. There was no sense of spaciousness we like to hear,  which mirrors our experience (most of us) as listeners with two ears, catching sound waves at slightly different times. Jim Henry advised me to double the guitar track and pan it wide left and right, offset the copy a few milliseconds to mimic what ears here, and then place the keyboard line and pad strings wider in the mix. Additional EQ adjustments would create space for the vocal in the middle and reduce muddiness. I know all of this works well for him so I tried it. And failed. I ended up with horrible phase problems and found that the processing on the vocal created even more mush in the middle. Yikes.

This is what the tracks for "Seculare" look like as .wav files.

One guitar track it is, then, panned a little to the left. Vocal center. Keyboard pan at about 2 o'clock, harmonies wide, and the final piano line hard right. I think the result is worthy. Maybe not album-worthy, but certainly shareable. The love is there anyway. So here you go.

Experiments like this one teach me a lot, and lay the technical and artistic groundwork for the simple, stripped-down solo album I'm planning for 2023. So even when the result doesn't quite hit the mark, the effort is worth it. I appreciate having the opportunity to share the performance with you anyway, and hope you'll seek out Eliza's gorgeous studio version as well.

Sending you wishes for happiness, inspiration, good health, and gratitude for your part in all I do. I am capable of more and better because you are there cheering me on. xotg