A funny thing happened while I was remixing songs from the 80's...
Although I've always liked this song, the tape was in bad condition and I wasn't sure I could pull out a mix from it, but the guitar and keyboard solos were worth it to invest some time and effort to extract those tracks and performances. While I was archiving notes and music scores I found the lyric sheet and thought about what I had written. For a simple dance pop song there was a lot of intent behind those lyrics that I must have been channeling from my personal life at the time. There hadn't been that much thought behind it- unlike another song I had really struggled with at the time. So I started to decode some darker meaning from this upbeat recording which is something I've never done before and I'm not even sure what exactly I've accomplished here. Since this is the first post in a series of podcasts it's best to get an experiment like this out of the way early. Also to help follow along, I've posted the song lyrics here.
Copyright© 1989
ELECTROTAINMENT
All rights reserved.
Never hold you back
Forever
Never do you that way
Never take the time
To hurt you
With the things I say
We have what it takes
If that's what love is for
We possess the key
Don't break
Don't break down the door
We are caught in time
In the time that it takes to be in love
Read between the lines
And deny what you did for me tonight
What you did for me all night
[First Guitar Solo]
You never told the truth
To cut me
This cuts like a knife
And you never made no moves
To hold me
To keep me in your life
I knew all along
That our love was unspoken
Now it didn't take too long
For that spell
To be broken
We are caught in time
In the time that it takes to be in love
Walk between the lines
And deny what you will for me, in spite
What you willfully deny
[Second Guitar Solo]
[Break]
[Keyboard Solo]
[Third Guitar Solo]
And I'll never hold you back
And I'll never take the time to
Never hold you back
And I'll never wonder why you
Never hold me back
And I'll never take the time to
Never hold me back
And I'll Never
Never
Never
Never
[Forth Guitar Solo]
Never take the time to
Hold me back from you
Hello World!
Welcome to Song In A Mirror!
This is the very first post of what I hope will be a long-running podcast series. OK, so what exactly is "Song In A Mirror" and what's this "RMFSR" stuff all about? Let's take that second part first as it describes what you'll find inside this podcast feed: Rediscovered Music From Saved Recordings, "RMFSR" in short. "From Saved Recordings" could be old Master Tapes, MIDI or other Digital Files- possibly even stored on old Floppy Disks or even a written Music Notation Score or Chart which is the original format for recording and saving music handed down through the centuries. Whatever method that was used to remember a composition or performance, I'll do my best to find the best quality source to "Rediscover" the music and try to digitally restore and present it as if it were brand new today. I probably won't always be successful but I'm looking forward to what I find along the way.
As for the podcast name "Song In A Mirror" I'm going to be drawing from an archive of music that I've composed, performed and produced starting in my teen years. This is gazing in a Mirror if you will, to see what's over your shoulder behind you while facing yourself staring back today. It seems like a terribly narcissistic endeavor but I've also never kept a private diary or written a personal blog- this music is my diary. And of course there are friends along the way who collaborated to realize this music together. I'm looking forward to hearing all of them again.
I could continue writing more here and what inspired me to start but you'll have to just wait for the podcast.
So here's a short podcast audio seed. It's not at all representative of what you'll hear coming up in the following episodes but it just seemed intuitively right to post this here and now. This recording was inspired at the time by my university studies of Musique Concrète and was primarily recorded in my partner's office den in 1986 on a TEAC 3340-S tape machine where I spliced a 1/4" 4 track tape for sections to run backward and out of sequence, splicing tape pieces that had been randomly thrown on the floor and mixed up. I had read the Beatles had done this on one of their recordings and was intrigued by the randomness of the idea. The concept of doing things by chance sometimes inspired by the I Ching also was in my thoughts because I was writing a research paper on composer John Cage at the time. The recorded sound sources were from my new Yamaha CX5M Music Computer and my partner's Baldwin Baby Grand Piano in the living room. The other recording mixed in was made a few years later and is played on the Ensoniq EPS Sampler using samples of my Wuhan Chinese Cymbal, an IBM PC-XT Compatible "Clone" Computer booting it's 5 1/4" Floppy Drive, and a stock industrial sound effect.
With that, let's boot the podcast!