Softening - What Makes Certain Songs So Special

June 5 at 8:02pm via iPhone 

StuGuru commented: "Dude I'm digging 'Softening' on iPod in my car. Nice, Til."

Thanks man. Sincerely one of my all time favs. As you well know, every new song we write is "awesome"... until a few days pass. Then reality sinks in and that new song gets put in its proper place amongst all the others. Some seem later a darn near total waste of time and energy they're so bad. But most fall into that 'fair to alright' category. Then there are those very rare super special ones that just won't stop being awesome no matter how much time passes or how many times we listen to them. 'Softening' is like that for me. So I'm glad to read you say that. It is quite incredible in a car. True that. Strangely enough, for whatever reason (i know the other guys tend to feel the same way), the Nothing Is Cohesive album seems to have more of those "special songs" on it than any of the others we released thus far. (I say "released" because we've still not released two others that have already been recorded, and I dare say that both of them might compete with NIC once they're released). Again, for me only, personally as a listener I tend to still like more songs on this particular album than any of our others. "Somebody kill the DJ' 'Caetano' 'All this is beginning to feel like an ending' 'Tomorrow' 'Softening' 'Bored' 'Cleopatra Ecstasy'... every single one of those falls into that "holy crap that's awesome" category for me. What was it? Just the song choice? We always have hundreds to choose from... and usually we do choose good ones. But i do think it was that Sir Basil; there's hardly a bad song on the album. (one might ask at this point "well why would anyone put a "bad" song on their album in the first place?" The answer to that is "they wouldn't. no one does. we just don't know it's a bad song when we are recording. We are fooled by the allure of the newness of the song into thinking it is good... only to discover later that it wasn't that great) But more than just good song choosing, i also think it was "the sound" and "the vibe of the band"... that made that album so seemingly chock full of great songs and tasty.

Nothing Is Cohesive was certainly our most critically acclaimed album to date. It was A+ and five stars across the board; it appeared on "short lists" and went out to "taste makers lists" -- something you work your whole career to attain. And that felt great. Both Rise and Shine, and the Sleep With You album had their fair share of poor reviews. NIC didn't receive one. Part of that was because we were so free recording that album. With Rise and Shine we had a definite agenda to "push the boundaries as far as we could, push the envelope as far as possible" in terms of what could be accepted as "popular music", adding all the different 'World Music' styles into it and throwing everything in but the kitchen sink. And with Sleep With You I personally as the singer and songwriter had a definite agenda of then trying to disprove all the critical hype that I was a "starry-eyed New Age optimist that had never lived the rock 'n' roll life style", that I "had just floated in on a cloud and a dream and saw the world through rose colored glasses." I didn't think that image fit the whole me. So looking back I think I missed the mark a bit by over-shooting on that one. But with Nothing Is Cohesive, we didn't have any agenda other than simply trying to create "the best damn album of the year" or "of all time." I mean, we really were just five guys in a band trying to do our absolute best to write and record great music. THAT vibe soaked through us, soaked through our instruments, and soaked into the beat up old computer that Vancouver used to run Pro-Tools while he primitively attempted to record what we were laying down in his rehearsal space in the garage of his mom's house. That's how primitive the surroundings were and I really think it helped.

The other thing WAS the SOUND. We did sound great. As a band. By that point we had been recording and performing and touring regularly for five straight years. So we had our shit together big time in terms of being a tight unit as a band. We could read each others' minds, musically speaking. I was still writing as vociferously as I always do. anywhere from five to ten songs a week is the norm. So the song choices were a combination between the newest of the new, such as "I wanna know ya" -- which was literally written while it was being recorded, to some older "classics" such as "Bored" -- which I had written almost ten years prior but had not yet recorded with a band. All we did was "listen" to me or one of the other guys play a song and almost immediately we knew if it was "in" or "out". It either fit or it didn't. Most did. So picking songs for the album was a no brainer. Another thing that helped was the other members of the band starting to introduce songs of their own, rather than it all just being about me and my songs. Vancouver contributed the music for "I wanna know ya" and the entire song "Andrea's Fault" (which got cut last minute and was later released on the City of Lost Children rarities album. Father Bloopy contributed the music and melody of what would eventually become "Cleopatra Ecstasy" -- a song he had laying around called "Crazy Paving." I just changed the lyrics to make them more relevant to my own personal life so when I sang the song it made more sense and had more meaning for me to sing passionately. Even our drummer #2 Young William contributed a poem entitled "All this is beginning to feel like an ending," which was so moving that it prompted me to sit down at the piano and write melody to it. That turned out to be one of our most popular songs ever. Thank God we opened that up, allowing everyone to contribute. It helped tremendously. Not just with the music, but also with the feelings and the morale of the group. It felt like a real group project.

"Softening" -- since that's what started all this reflection initially -- was a massively collaborative project. The title and concept of the song came from a suggestion by a girl I was communicating with often over long distance Skyping and video-phoning. This idea of "letting go" and becoming 'softer' as a person... that was the trip that we were on. Still are. I started composing the music to it and would play it for her over the computer through Skype and she would type lyrical ideas that I would then copy and paste and then print out and leave on my piano. A few weeks later, while singing the song through the loudspeakers in my rehearsal studio, my cousin Rosie Posie was visiting from the UK and she started singing the middle section "I'm letting go... I'm letting go"... out of the blue. It fit perfectly. And it was one of the few times that I let a song take on that many contributors. Not for any particular reason other than the fact that usually when I am writing a song I am alone and I get them done pretty fast. But this one I let marinate a lot before calling it "complete."

And re "the vibage"... all I can say is that, again, due to how long we had been together by that point, there was a really good vibe going within the group. And I think that translates to the finished product. Our morale was so high that it allowed us the rare opportunity to cover an old McCartney B-side, 'Tomorrow.' Normally, being an original band trying to forge new ground and territory and make a name for ourselves, we wouldn't have permitted ourselves to record a cover of somebody else's song. But we did it because we wanted to. Because it felt right.

It was also the first album we recorded outside of a major recording studio. No producers telling us what to do or how to play our instruments. No interns. No massive recording gear sitting all over the place. In fact, it was just the opposite. Instead we were surrounded by tons and tons of junk and garbage. Vancouver is a notorious slob. But the atmosphere worked. As far as creativity goes, because we weren't on the clock and therefore spending hundreds of dollars per hour, everyone felt free to experiment more and try new things. The 7/8 time of the middle-eight bridge of "Somebody kill the DJ" is a good example of that. The bird sounds and the outside street noise one can hear behind "If your baby could" came from the fact that Vancouver thought it would be a good idea if I recorded the whole song outside "in nature" so he just set up two microphones, placed them in front of me and told me "record" a hundred times until I got it just right. This environment also allowed Vancouver to go off with his recorded parts because there was no one there telling him "no." So he laid down tens of guitar lines, often harmonizing them with one another; and he even played cello parts -- simply because he happened to have a cello laying around the studio that week. Again, normally a producer would never let a guitarist "attempt to record cello parts even though you're not a cellist." That wouldn't have happened had we been in a "real" studio. But the results were sublime; as can be heard on "I wanna know ya" and "Caetano." A non-cello playing guitarist laid down some of the coolest and gorgeous albeit out of tune cello parts ever and no one was the wiser to it.

Writing about it makes me want to put it in and listen to it once more. And that's a good thing. I normally don't enjoy listening to our albums once the novelty of them passes and they are released. But I never tire of listening to the Nothing Is Cohesive album. It is always a very viscerally enjoyable experience for me. Truly transcendent. Each and every time. I hope to say that about future albums we record or release. And I hope that others feel the same way as we do about the album. It was more than any other a real labor of love and passion for music making.

Listen to Nothing Is Cohesive on SoundCloud here: Ed Hale and The Transcendence - Nothing Is Cohseive by Dying Van Gogh