Narrative+Essay

It was late in August, school was starting in a week and Garrett and I had left the last day of marching band camp early to go deal with more important issues. Those issues were mixing our band’s new EP. An EP is a partial album, so it usually consists of 5 to 8 songs and the total length is usually between 30 to 40 minutes. We drove down to Cortlandt Manor, New York and arrived at the recording studio, which was really just the recording engineer, Chris O’Neil’s house. We met up with the three others, John, Brandon, and Phil, at the studio. When we walked in it was like being home again. We had spent three days the week before recording everything, plus while Garrett and I were at band camp, Phil and Brandon went back to record vocals. Chris greeted us and took us in through the house down to the basement recording studio, the place where each of us had laid our hearts and souls into the musical recordings. The recording studio, AFA Studios had previously held a battle of the bands at the beginning of the summer, the grand prize was free recording time for an EP. We had won.

“We’re actually not going to do the mixing tonight guys, the mixing usually takes place in the next few months on our own and we’ll send you each draft of the mixes,” Chris said. It was obvious that we were all a little disappointed, we had wanted to mix the EP tonight. “But we can show you each song and tell us if there are any last minute changes you want. I’m sure you guys want to hear how the EP came out anyway.” That completely changed everyone’s mood in the room. Of course we wanted to hear it.

“Yeah, that sounds good,” Garrett replied. So Chris brought up the first song, which everyone was anxious to hear. It was the newest song we had written and at that time everyone’s favorite; it was called “The Fact That I’ve Been Dead For Quite Some Time Now Is Of No Concern To You, Charles.”

“Charles,” which is what everyone in our band calls the song, first appeared one day at a band practice when were just doing a random jam. We had just been having a fun jam like we always did, and we jam, we always get really into it, like the jams become 15 minutes long and go across bunches of different song layouts. We had been jamming like that when Garrett came up with this new and different idea. It was very different than the usual stuff we write and it always reminded me of some kind of dark western. We kept it in our long list of songs-to-write inventory and later on, maybe a month later, we took that and applied the writing process to it. The song wasn’t easy to write at all, everything had to be perfect, we couldn’t just put something in that was “okay”, this song had potential to be great, it needed to be perfect. After we had won the battle of the bands for AFA we were a little way into writing the song, and decided that Charles was going to be on the EP we had won recording time for. To us this song was so far the best thing we had ever written and we were just about to hear it recorded.

The D that the song started out with seemed to articulate with a punch in the face and die down as Garrett’s acoustic part became the center of attention. It took me to some western town out in the middle of nowhere that had a dark presence to it, not a place you wanted to be. The intro of the song kept building until the distorted guitar came in with the vocals. The intro of the song was like an intro of a story, the setting and mood were set and the vocals told the main plot line. The plot line kept building as the song built and then exploded into the “jam section” which is also like another chorus. The jam section was so intense, Brandon’s vocal track held out a note that seemed to keep rising into nothingness as another vocal track recited the more important lyrics under it. John, Garrett, and I hadn’t heard it before and just looked at Brandon and smiled. He had done such a great job with that part, it was beyond words. The jam section ended and went into the first verse. The verses were very much creepy sounding and as the sustained note from one of my guitar tracks disappeared and was left with Garrett’s lonely acoustic part I felt a very odd uncomfortableness that the music expressed. The rest of the band then came in and Brandon continued telling us the story of the man in black that had come into town telling the protagonist, Charles, how by the end of the week the whole town would be dead.

The storyline of the song is just that; it is about, what to me is a western town in the middle of nowhere where a six foot three man in black approaches. He calls out to a man in the town named Charles. He continues to tell the man how at the end of the week the whole town will be dead because of a reckoning. It is never told at the end of the song what exactly happens to the town but that is all up to interpretation. They are very dark lyrics for our band and the man in black, though never told directly, can signify the devil. After the verse, another jam section took us away. The jam section calms down into a softer section that has a chord progression that always extracts a sad emotion from me. This soft section is only a calm before the storm, as soon as that part ended it went right into a transition that then puts you into the main chorus. The acoustic guitar articulation on the D minor chord once again seemed to punch you in the face. The lead line that I had recorded over the syncopated rhythm of the bass and acoustic guitar left for a good support of Brandon’s vocals. After the chorus another verse came in to give off that uncomfortable feeling of the man in black, followed by one last chorus. The song to this point was five minutes in but we still had another half of it to listen to.

Back when we were writing the song we had gotten as far as we had right now while listening to the recording. The next part of the song was going to be the guitar solo. Not all our songs have guitar solos but a majority of them do and because I’m lead guitarist, I write and play the solos. The guitar solo for Charles was different from most because it was the entire second half of the song. The guitar solos for our songs are never five minutes long but what had happened is John suggested the solo starts off soft and I play a clean solo for two sections. Then when I started playing the solo with distortion he suggested we keep building up the solo, and eventually that whole process became five minutes long. This solo had been my whole life during the summer, it had to be written perfectly. We couldn’t get this far, with so much going for this song just for me to write some half-ass guitar solo, that could take all the great things we had written together and throw it in the trash. I had a lot of pressure on me, I was pretty much writing the rest of the song alone. I would never have a chance to write another five minute solo either so I needed to take full advantage of the moment. Five minutes is also a long time for a guitar solo too, it had to be good to keep the listener’s interest. I had focused all summer on this solo, I had written stuff only to completely get rid of it and start over again and I had John help suggest a few ideas that I took and wrote a part with. It was my brainchild if you will, and I was about to hear the final product.

I knew everything in the solo, I knew what portion of it was up next and I knew what was next after that. I waited for certain parts to come and see the reactions of my fellow bandmates. It was like reading a book but already knowing exactly what the author is going to say next and what the reaction is. Hearing the solo was just amazing, for the first time I could listen to it as if I was a spectator listening to some other person’s solo. I’m always the one playing the solo and never listening to it so in a way I never get to hear it for what it is. It was so odd, it felt like I wasn’t the one who had recorded the solo, or even wrote it, it seemed way beyond me and not possible for me to even put together. It wasn’t like I felt pride in myself, but I felt astonished, like I can actually do that? I have the compatibility to write something like that? Since when? I was speechless, I just wanted to jump in the air with joy I was so happy and proud of my accomplishment, better yet I knew that the second half of the song wouldn’t be a disapointment to the listener.

While listening to it, the solo almost broke away from the aspect of me and became its own entity. It was no longer being played by me in the recording, it was no longer a guitar plugged into an amp, it was a voice, a voice telling its own story. A story that was surrounded with emotion, emotion that was never clear to me while writing it but all of a sudden was right in front of me and I felt it. I’ve never connected with another single piece of music as much as I did right now, not even our own music. The emotion was just overflowing me and it almost made me want to cry.

In late June, around a week before the battle of the bands, my grandfather had passed away from a long struggle with pancreatic cancer. Naturally, it affected me a lot, but it affected me even more because I was close with him. All of this was still fresh in my mind when the summer approached, so most of my summer had thoughts about him. I had never realized it until now, after listening to the solo recorded and with the full band behind it, but the solo told just that story. It told the story of the pain I had been through and how grieving was hard and it wouldn’t be easy to move on. I never realized how much emotion had flooded out into the solo while writing it, but when it was put together I could feel and hear it all. I could feel the sadness I had felt, I could feel the pain I had been through, and I realized that the solo itself had nothing to do with the song. It never had to do with the man in black who approached the town and talked to Charles, it was about the grieving process behind death and maybe no one else realized this now but I did. I felt how different it was, it was a completely different song and story.

I had never felt anything like that before and it made me feel better when listening to it. After the song everyone was saying how good it had came out, even after we left the recording studio we kept talking about how proud we were and how excited we were to release the EP in the coming months. All I could think about was how successful I had been writing the solo. Music is a language that most people often forget about, it is a form of communication and to me one of the strongest forms of it; the solo made me realize this. It made me realize music can truly tell a story through emotion, it doesn’t need to have lyrics to tell a story, as long as it is filled with emotion the instruments will become the voices that tell the story.

I really enjoyed writing this essay because I find narratives the easiest to write. Its always been easy for me to write stories, however, it was hard to write this because I needed to add specific elements of voice and it had to be about language, which is hard to do. Narratives for me are usually more free, but in the end I think it came out well.