(River Flows Like) Fine Red Wine
Fine Red Wine (Alternate Take)
I was inspired to do a love song after Jeannie and I celebrated our Twennyversary. It’s basically a classic R&B kind of groove and the changes are all based on the 7th chords. It also has intro which uses an ostinato over descending bass line that wraps around, creating some dark and interesting chords. (This intro is a bit unusual for me in that almost everything I’ve written for this project so far and for the Brothers Zing before tend to have chord progressions that move upward. Regard this as a coincidence, or maybe a phase I’m going thru, but I noticed it and think it’s kind of intriguing.) No worries though, the main riff moves upward. As so often happens, I had a couple musical patterns I was playing around with and the lyric made the whole thing come together.
It’s a fun number to play, and fairly easy compared to a lot of my tunes. I laid down the vocals fairly quickly. The harmony was pretty spontaneous, I didn’t really try and work it out ahead of time. I just had an idea and decided to go for it. I like the way it came out. It has bit of a rough quality to it, but I think that’s part of its charm. 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 turned out to be great song to solo on, and I did a few takes. In the end, I mixed down a second version with alternate takes of the solos.
This is the fourth song in my current recording 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 and master this set before starting in on the next batch. So watch this space.
Meanwhile, Martin has agreed to add some guitar tracks to these tunes. This should be 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 I continued on my own, and it was difficult at first because: 1.) it’s good to have a creative partner to bounce ideas off of, and 2.) everything takes twice as long when your doing it by yourself, and 3.) it’s hard to make rock music without a guitar in there. But I decided not to worry about it and went ahead and made my peace with not having a guitars in the arrangements, and you know, took it as a creative challenge. As it turns out I’m actually quite happy with this set of tunes. Now some time has gone by and Martin is putting back together his recording studio again, and says it’ll be good way to get back into recording to help me with these tracks. So I’m thinking of it something like Andy Summers sitting in on Nothing Like the Sun. We’ll see where this leads and what influence it has on the second side of the record.