Heat Wave .
Angel Or Alien .
The Nine .
Fine Red Wine .
Who Can Fool Me
Earthbound .
Green Glove .
Making Miles .
Touch The Ceiling .
Bonus Tracks
My new album Face The Heat is almost done. I've just completed the final mixdown and mastering. All that remains is the ablum cover and liner notes, getting CD's made, and getting it out to the people via CD Baby and the iTunes store. Here are the tracks for a limited time only, and a bit about each song.
Heat Wave
Lyrics and music by John Szinger, 2006I wanted to lead off the record write a high-energy summertime party rock song, and came up with a number called Heat Wave, inspired by a vacation in Florida. As the song developed, it became a bit twisted, with a 7/8 time signature, copious use of upward chromatic movement, jazz chords, allusions to John Coltrane, and an environmentalist subtext. But it sure is high energy.
I had originally thought of doing it in a Brothers Zing style, with a horn section and guitar, and that I’d ask my brother Martin to play guitar and bari sax. But he recently moved and dismantled his recording studio, so that was not an option. I reconceptualized it for tenor sax and a synth horn section, and layers of synths instead of guitars.
It took a while to get the arrangement together, and then the drum part was fairly tedious on a sequencer. Which is ironic, because the whole point of it to make it sound free and spontaneous, and above all really grooving. At least the bass went down fairly easily, played live and in real time. I added a clav part to the chorus and bridge to give a little rhythmic counterpoint to the piano and bass. I decided the tenor sax might sound really cool to add in a lower voice from the bari sax. Martin loaned me his bari a while back, so I did that part myself. I haven’t played bari in ages, but the part went down fairly quickly and came out great, and added just the right reinforcement to the horn section.
Angel or Alien
Lyrics and music by John Szinger, 2007A quasi-autobiographical number, this song is a sci-fi reverie about contemplating the wonder of the night sky and speculation about things that can be seen but not readily explained. It’s fairly long, with sort of a prog sound and multi-part structure. There’s an ethereal synth intro, segueing into a slow jazzy part, then fast middle part with meter changes and churning, swooping, blazing gonzo synthesizers, and then a recapitulation and elaboration of the first part. The chords are based mainly on stacked 4ths over shifting roots, which is a pretty cool sound.
The bass part involves a lot of two-note chords. I double-tracked the part, which creates a natural chorus effect. Drums for me always involve a lot of editing, building up and pulling down, creating dimension like a chalk drawing.
The song features an analog-style synthesizer solo in the middle section. In the old days I would have played this on a real synthesizer and twiddled the knobs live. But my setup has gone all digital and fully computerized, so I ended up using a software synthesizer inside proTools for the patch. Thanks to John Neumann for rendering out the midi of my synth solo on his Nord Lead synthesizer, providing an extra dimension of analog wow. I mixed it in with my software-simulated Moog.
The Nine
Lyrics by John Szinger, 2007. Music by John Szinger, 1996, 2007This is a new incarnation of a song that I wrote years ago and I liked enough to want to revisit it. I had previously recorded it with Flip|Hippo, but we did the recording under enormous time pressure and I was never really satisfied with my sax playing. Plus I wanted to expand it a bit and do something new with it.
The song is based on a nine-note ostanato played by two pianos. The pattern phases every nine bars. On top of is layered the rhythm section and melody. It is both flowing and machine-like, sort of relentless and melancholy. My new version highlights the dramatic tension of the song arc across the choruses. I added a break in the middle and a lyric, inspired by Led Zeppelin in that it’s cool to pepper your songs with Tolkien references.
The other thing about this song is it’s kind of heavy on the synths and effects. I mainly use software synthesizers nowadays, but there were a couple sounds on my 90’s version I really liked. So I fired up my venerable Kurzweil K2000RS synthesizer/sampler and dialed up the a patches. I haven’t used that thing in years and have forgotten what a great sounding piece of gear it is.
(River Flows Like) Fine Red Wine
Lyrics by John Szinger, 2007. Music by John Szinger, 2008A love song. I was inspired after Jeannie and I celebrated our Twennyversary. The lyrics are heartfelt and straightforward. For the music I wanted something accessible and soulful, so it’s a classic R&B kind of groove and the changes are all based on 7th chords. As so often happens, I had a couple musical patterns I was playing around with and the lyric made the whole thing come together. The intro uses an ostanato over a descending bass line that wraps around, passing thru some dark and interesting chords. This is a bit unusual for me in that almost everything I’ve written in the last few years tends to have chord progressions that move upward, having done the downward thing in many compositions over the years. No worries though, the main riff moves upward. Also the intro is in 3/4 time, while the main body of the song is 4/4. I couldn’t leave well enough alone and for the bridge the meter alternates between 3 and 4, for a bit of extra fun.
I laid down the vocals fairly quickly. The harmony was pretty spontaneous, I didn’t try and work it out ahead of time. I just had an idea and decided to go for it, and liked the way it came out. I put a full horn section arrangement on it, four saxophones: soprano, alto tenor and baritone. Thanks again to Martin for loaning me his bari sax. I had so much fun playing it I decided to give the bari a solo.
This is the fourth song in the project, so I have a logical album side or virtual EP. I have another set of tunes ready to start in on, but I want to take a break, so I’ll probably mix this set before starting in on the next batch.
Martin had agreed to add some guitar tracks to these tunes, which would have been interesting and cool. I really enjoyed working with him on the BZ project. He’s a versatile and creative musician who is good at coming up with parts that contribute to the arrangement, often in unexpected ways. By the end of the BZ project our writing and arranging was growing closer, and was looking forward to continuing with that. However, Martin had other things going on at the time so that fell thru. I continued on my own, decided not to worry and made my peace with not having guitars in the arrangements, letting it push me into a new creative space. And I’m actually quite happy with how this set of tunes turned out.
Who Can Fool Me
Lyrics and music by John Szinger, 2008Who is more the fool, the fool or the fool who follows?
This is the fifth song of my record, or perhaps the first song of Side 2. It’s a defiant and bitter song, a reaction against the constant lies and manipulation coming from forces of power in our society thru the media, and how everyone seems to go along with it rather than questioning and maintaining the sovereignty of one’s own mind and judgment. I came up with the basic idea for the song a few years back, and refined it this fall. The feel of the song is tense end edgy. It takes a cue from old-time cartoon jazz, but sort of warped and twisted and blended with modern electronica. Structurally, it’s basically a C minor blues, played in a stride style, but in 7/4 time. The basic blues chords are embellished with upward chromatic harmonic movement.
The song features a synthesizer solo. The track has a virtual orchestra consisting of a mellotron, a string section, and two real saxophones -- tenor and soprano. The lead synth combines with the saxes is designed to evoke the classic jazz horn section of a trumpet, clarinet and tenor sax, as used by for example Raymond Scott. I wanted the synth to sound something like a cross between a gutbucket trumpet played with a plunger mute and wah-wah guitar with a warm overdrive. This gave me occasion to plug in my venerable Yamaha VL-70 wind synthesizer. It is a very cool piece of technology that produces sounds thru physical modeling. The sounds are responsive to multiple realtime continuous controls, and the unit is designed to work with a wind controller such as Yamaha’s WX-11. The combo of the WX-11 and VL-70 is very playable, and feels alot like playing a real saxophone. It’s been years since I’ve played this thing, I spent some time getting used to the instrument, and paging thru the presets to see what I liked. I found several patches that fall either into the “brass” or “guitar” category, but no suitable morph of the two. I finally settled on a muted jazz trumpet patch. Amazingly, it sounds almost too real, but a bit of flange effect moved it nicely into the suitably electronic-sounding zone.
The recording came together pretty quickly. It was less than two months from start to finish, which is much better than the 3 or 4 months some of my other songs took. Admittedly those were longer songs and this one is only three minutes but still, I may be getting better at this!
Earthbound (I Wanna Fly)
Lyrics and music by John Szinger, 2009This one is a winter-themed sort of Kafkaesque metaphor of metamorphosis and rebirth. I had written a sketch of the lyric a few years ago, and combined it with an idea from Lizzy to create a whole new song. The chorus is based on the riff Lizzy made up. It turned out to be a great hook, a sort of hopeful transcendent mantra. The theme evolved from a metaphor into a rather specific impression of my morning commute. Coming out of Grand Central Station into the weather, becoming part of a crush of people, like a cell in a larger organism, and arriving at Times Square in all it’s neon monstrosity. The city is seen as a virtual reality devoid of nature apart from the dark and cold.
This is a bit more of a standard rock song for me. It doesn’t use any out time signatures or strange jazz chords, and it doesn’t even have a solo section. Instead it relies on an insistent riff and building repetitions of the chorus, contrasted with a more introspective and narrative verse. The sound is sort of an post-prog pop. There’s a good deal of synthesizers and lots of layers of vocals. I had Lizzy sing on the chorus, part of a wall of voices in the ending section. (Not to miss out on the fun, Michelle has been pitching a song idea called "Ouch My Toe." I told her I wasn’t too sure about that one, so now she has a new on "You Can’t See Me".)
Green Glove
Lyrics and music by John Szinger, 2009I made this one up last winter when we were painting our house and a green glove literally fell out of the coat closet and onto my head. I just started spontaneously singing it and we had a good laugh. Days later I was still singing it, and it seemed like it was a catchy tune so I decided to work on it and record it. The song is on the short side and the lyric is deliberately repetitive, in contrast to my last song which was very verbose. There's a big ol' piano solo in the middle and the ending builds up to a big coda, so none of the repeats are quite the same.
This was something of a departure from my usual way of arranging. In the past I've tended to work out the structure of a song to the point where I can sing it the whole way thru and accompany myself on piano, and that gives me the skeleton that I can use as a basis for arranging and recording. But for this one the arrangement was more mutable and I did a good amount of experimenting once I started tracking. To some extent this was inevitable because there's a fair amount of layering going on in the vocals and in the instruments in the second half of the tune. I think I've achieved a pretty funky groove, and the piano solos ain't too bad if I say so myself. Thanks to Jeannie for singing the backing vocals in the outro.
Making Miles
Lyrics and music by Martin SzingerMaking Miles was written by my brother Martin many years ago after coming home from a month of hiking on the Appalachian Trail. I visited him recently and when I got home I started playing it on piano, flowing out spontaneously. It’s one of the best songs he’s ever written, and ranks as one of my favorite songs of all time. The lyrics are melancholy yet hopeful, and the music is sweet and full of subtle turns that make it rewarding to play and listen to.
I’m trying to get my album completed this fall in order to make more time for origami. I have seven songs finished but need another two. I have more than enough songs that are half written, but I realized it’s a lot of work to go from having a basic concept for the lyrics and chords to working all the details of the structure and arrangement, and more and more I’ve been composing and arranging in the studio, with the results that it takes a long time to do a single song. I had wanted a solo piano song for this record, and this one fit the bill nicely.
My arrangement is basically just piano and voice, and I was able to record and mix it very quickly. The parts went down fast and captured alot of the original spontaneity. The piano part is my own voicings, but an approximate adaptation of the way Martin plays it on guitar. I added a synth bass part following Martin’s suggestion (“Taurus pedals”) and multi-tracked the lead vocals to create a natural chorus effect.
Touch The Ceiling
Lyrics and music by Mark ColicchiaLike Making Miles, this one is a cover of sorts, a blast from my own past. Way back in the 1980’s I was in the prog rock group Infinigon. We did mainly covers by bands like Rush, Yes, Genesis, and ELP, but we aspired to write our own original songs. Touch the Ceiling was one of the best. It was written by our drummer Mark Colecchia, crafted by contributions from the whole group. The song is a good expression of Mark’s philosophy as well as a really good song with a strong melody and groove, some interesting twists, an atmospheric middle section and a jamming ending.
I’m doing this new arrangement in collaboration with John Neumann, the original bassist for Event Horizon, who is now a fellow recording studio artist and the driving force behind Tea With Warriors. He’s playing the bass and guitar, singing the second parts, and contributing some cool synthesizer textures. It was a lot of fun collaborating with John. He had a bunch of new fresh ideas that expanded my idea of what the song could be. The arrangement was true in spirit to the original version, but updated as well. The major difference is now we have all this machinery making modern music where back in the day we had to cover all the parts live. I’m doing most of the keyboard parts. The spine of the track is my Fender Rhodes part, on top of which I layered a lead synth that was fairly faithful to the original. On top of that we layered a few more synths. John broke down the guitar part into layers and built it up track by track, and in the end I had six tracks of guitars to integrate, a veritable guitar army!
Mark is perhaps the best drummer I ever worked with, and I tried to do justice to his style, energy, and chops in my drum track. I record my drums using the “four finger” method. I use a general midi drum kit layout and the left hand covers the kick drum and snare and the right hand does the hi-hat and cymbals. Then I go back and punch in and/or hand edit anything extra I need. I don’t typically use a lot of fills, but in the song it seemed like a good idea. There’s even an eight-bar drum break after the guitar solo that was a lot of fun to do.
My vocal on this song was delivered in a more hard rock style than usual. I was inspired by John’s suggestion to listen to David Lee Roth on some classic Van Halen. John later claimed he was joking, but I think the vocal is quite successful. I even added some spontaneous lyrics in the ending jam, as all chaos breaks loose among the synths and guitars. There’s going to be a fade out in the final version, but for now it just runs out to the end of the jam.
So this is it for the songs on my new record. Next I’ll be going over them one by one with an ear to fine tuning the levels and effects and cleaning up anything I might’ve missed, in preparation for the final mixdown and mastering. My friend Erik has agreed to help me mix and master the album. He came by and I ran him though my mixes, and we worked out a strategy for bringing them over to his studio. The main thing is he doesn’t use SampleTank, which is my main onboard software synthesizer, so I’m going to have to take all my drums and keyboard tracks and render them out as audio. So I’ll be getting going on that as I finish this song.
Bonus Tracks
Martha My Dear . Letter From Home2006-2007
I am working towards a follow-up to Buzzy Tonic, but it is early in the process and still taking shape. Maybe it will be a solo project, or another collaboration with my brother, or it might involve other musicians. I'm developing new material but that takes a while. So for now I am working on a series of covers to investigate specific issues with the recording process. Maybe they'll end up as bonus tracks or an EP someday.
The first of these is Martha My Dear, a Beatles song off the White Album. It's a quirky Paul song, very studio-ish in style, with a brass and string orchestra accompanying basically a piano arrangement. I wanted to see if I could map the orchestra to sounds in my own sonic palette, and I re-interpreted it as a bit more electric and synth-y. I was also interested in capturing that "natural chorus" multitrack vocal sound that the Beatles used to such great effect.
As a companion, a B-side if you will, I did a version of Letter From Home by Pat Metheny. I picked this song for a few reasons. Like Martha it's pretty short, about 2 and a half minutes, but that's about there the similarity ends. It's an jazz ballad, beautiful, yearning, ethereal, melancholy. I used to play a few Metheny tunes back in the day with Event Horizon, so this is also a bit of a nod to that. On a technical level, I wanted to see how proTools handled a tune that was completely rubato, and with meter changes, with it's automatic beat tracking tools. It turned out to work OK, but a fair amount of manual assist was required. Now that I have the gist of it, the next one will go quicker.
Musical compositions and audio recordings on this page ©1988-2010 John Szinger, or used by permission of their respective copyright holders. Published by Zing-Man Music, all rights reserved. Reproduction and distribution for commercial purposes is prohibited.
