BREAKDOWN ANALYSIS by Planet Giles
TRACK #4
TIME
(from the INSIGHTS album released in 2022)
TIME started as a song for my sister’s daughter called Gabriela. In the end it became Time, and Gabriela has made her way onto another song in which she will be immortalised!
TIME is my favourite song on this album. It has taken the place of PACHA MAMA Track #6. The reason is not because of its simplicity, but because of its ridiculous complexity. Not only are there many musical parts which dovetail and weave together (and therefore had to be played as accurately as possible without resorting to quantization), but there is no let up! It is breakneck from beginning to end, changing form and key as it hurtles from section to section with barely a pause. And this is a wonderfully dynamic track to play live which demands 100% focus to pull off the complex rhythmic chords whilst singing the melody and its words in two languages.
I particularly love the way the SOLO just goes off on its own trip, so to speak! Scat singing is something Pete and I have always enjoyed, as it comes from a familiar jazz tradition which was brilliantly demonstrated by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. It is basically soloing with one’s voice, and is a lot of fun to do. I had demoed this solo a while back, but I felt I couldn’t do a better version, so I had to learn it from my own demoed version - fun, but couldn’t remember any of it, so I had to learn it from scratch.
It was a proud moment when Pete said that some of my chord changes and their subsequent weird bass lines were, ‘harder than anything I’ve ever played with King Crimson / 21st Century Schizoid Band’. High praise indeed! And weird because I never try to write weird chord structures. They just come out that way. But it’s always great when you write and play enough to develop your own sound and style, because that’s what creativity is really all about.
Check out the video of our Pete listening intently to a mix of this in Fuzz’s studio!
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