I had a very nice Thanksgiving weekend. Michelle came home for a visit, and we all went out to Long Island Thanksgiving day, and the rest of the time played some games and watched some movies and slept in every day day caught up on a bunch of random tasks. Among them…
I finally finished the song that could not be finished is finished. A Plague of Frogs is probably to most complicated song I’ve attempted to record, arrange and produce, in the terms of number of interlocking themes, changes in sound and tone, overall length, and sheer number of tracks and layers. In the end I made it a battle between sax vs. synth rather than sax vs. guitar, and I really leaned in to the bloopy, buzzy sound of the synthesizer to create an alien vibe. After I did the synth solo I had to put it aside for a while. I was in a phase of listening to heavily layered 80’s records like So, Synchronicity and Power Windows and had a bunch more ideas to further develop the arrangement. But then I got to a place where the build up in the middle section was satisfying, and after that there was nowhere else to go. I found myself sculpting the sound by taking things away rather than continuing to add more parts, and once that realization hit it was pretty quick to finish up the song and get to a good mixdown. The rest of the kitchen sink will have to wait for other songs.
So here it is.
https://zingman.com/music/mp3/plutoniumDirigible/PlagueOfFrogs54k.mp3
I hope you enjoy!