Always Collage

Writers

Written by Falcone, House, McDowell, Plumley, Sabatelli & Wishart

Performers

Bridget Remembers

I had written the lyrics in the 90's but never used them. Late one night Martin was in Ireland, Don had sent me some drum programs to write to and Always the vocals were born. I sang from start to finish, improvising in places where the lyrics needed repeating or changing slightly. I uploaded the take to Don and he wrote the music that became the mainstay of the track. I had to re-sing the vocals as they needed to be pitched correctly. It was so frustrating!! It took months to reproduce the relaxed soft style that I had so effortlessly produced that first night.

Martin played guitar on this. The first outing for his Variax. He got writer’s block on one section and it took ages to work through but the final take was done on my birthday last year. A great present!

Don Remembers

After I had Bridget’s lead vocal performance in place, I saw lots of possibilities where her voice could be used to create new parts. Let’s see...In the intro and outro (as well as some other places), you hear the background ah-ah-ah-ah-ah. Those are slivers of Bridget (3/100 of a second and 2/10 of a second). Some of them are pitched down. Some pitched up. Some are reversed. They’re delayed too. For the radio-friendly Always backing voice, I used a TL Space Very Small Speaker verb and an Echo Farm Delay set to the song’s tempo. I also boosted the voice at 7.2k, much more than I usually would. But it does achieve that old AM radio sound. And, my favorite addition to the song is the scary "male" background vocals in the middle of the song. I had visions of a Kate Bush ‘n’ Peter Gabriel duet, but my attempts at background vocals weren’t giving me what I wanted. So, I took Bridget’s lead, copied it to a new track, and depitched it an octave. Then I ran it through the same verb as the lead. To this day, it still can give me chills.

One other oddity in this piece is a semi-broken plug-in. Kind of. There was a public beta a few years ago for the Aurora Synth. I didn’t ever update to the better builds, but I am able to use it to produce very basic sine- or square-wavey alien sounds. These sounds get even more sci-fied when I run them out to my one piece of outboard gear, an Eventide Ultra Harmonizer.

With all the cool things going on in this piece, I’d love to see someone take this one and do a remix.

Don's Timeline