Sarahs Surprise

Writers

Original song written by Milburn & Wishart, with new material from Allen, Evans, Falcone & Rockwell

Performers

Bridget Remembers

Sarah's Surprise's origins also date back to the 80's and Next Year's Big Thing when we were a three piece sans bass. I played clarinet and sang. Now the song has incorporated parts of an unfinished song from that era and a whole new musical structure.

I invited Sarah to play on the track and emailed her an mp3 with mainly just singing on it. She really liked it and later that month she came out to the house to record her parts. She nearly didn't record the Pink Floyd like ending but we loved it and persuaded her!

This track also has Daevid doing glissando and Teed on acoustic guitar so it does need a bit of attention to work out who's who and what's what! Karen's backing vocals were a welcome surprise. Like all good singers she moved outside the plan and came up with something special.

Don Remembers

It kind of looks like I recorded the drum pattern, sent it to Bridget, and she immediately did the vocals the next day. I know she sometimes asks me for patterns in specific beats per minutes. So, it’s quite likely she had this one in the wings and I sent her multiple patterns and the ‘bebop’ one made a good aural connection.

I’m probably known more for my synth work, but throughout this CD, I definitely did more piano (and organ) than usual. I quite like the sound of the Velvet plug-in pianos. They seem to inspire me, and almost bring me back to those days in college when I used to compose in piano rooms in the music buildings (even though I wasn’t a music major).

Surprise was one of the toughest Earth Born pieces for me to get my mindset around, as charting out the chords from the vocals was more elusive than usual. Once I had possible chords, I needed to find a musical pattern or rhythm that made sense. Leaning on the piano’s lower register helped. And let the end piano phrases be different, let them breathe with the vocals, but without the drums or other instruments.

From the start, the bebop rhythm immediately reminded me of music from the Twin Peaks TV show and film. And, even before this piece started, I had thought of directing Bridget toward a Julie Cruise type piece or two. What I find amazing, is that Sarah came in (without hints or thoughts from me... in fact, we’ve never met), and she did this wonderful surf guitar... which is reminiscent of the Twin Peaks soundtrack guitar sound... and glues the whole piece together too. Probably a good thing we didn’t add sax to this!

I also love the light tension that’s emitted from Daevid’s gliss work. His session was during one of his yearly visits to San Francisco. He’ll set up a couple of local live performances and try to work in a session at my place. For this visit, he departed from Australia at 12:00, and arrived at SFO at 12:25. That’s one fast flight! I picked him up at the airport, and we proceeded to the home studio for a session that included work for this CD and others. After the session, we met up with guitarist Jay Radford and went to the Half Moon Brewery (where I learned that you can bring your dog). But that’s another tale.

Don's Timeline