On Friday I went into the studio (Adam Rothberg’s) to record demos of a couple songs. Although I’m gearing up to record a CD, it will be awhile until it happens, and I wanted to have some reasonable recordings of my newest songs, since I don’t really had a way to do that at home. I’ll write a little more about this recording process in a subsequent blog post, but for now I wanted to write about the experience recording Susanna’s Song. We began by recording a scratch track (that I would then listen to when recording vocals and guitar separately). And while doing that, Adam stopped me at some point and suggested a change for the chorus (the chorus is short: it fwas just “Oh my darling, are you coming home? Cross the Mississippi for to see me”). He said that when he heard it, it wanted a little bit more before the “for to see me” payoff. His first thought was that we could repeat the first line, but that didn’t really seem to fit. So I tried repeating “cross the Mississippi” – so it is, instead, “Cross the Mississippi, cross the Mississippi for to see me.” And it seemed to work. It’s hard to get perspective on the fly, but Adam thought it accomplished what he was looking for, and I thought it at least had potential (and, as he pointed out, if we decided we hated it, it’s easier to take something out that’s already there than to put something in that isn’t). So we recorded it that way. I’ll be curious to see how I feel about it when I hear the finished version. I kept being taken off guard by it (when, say, doing the vocal track and remembering that I had to sing that line twice), but not in a bad way. At minimum, it kept me off balance, which is probably a good way to keep things fresh. But I definitely think it has potential – and on the repeat chorus at the end I even sang it three times, which felt like what it wanted at that point in the song. We’d set an ending time for the recording session (largely because I had to get home to take the dog outside) and when we had about 20 minutes left Adam asked what I thought it would be most useful to do with that time. I said that the first line of the chorus felt like it really wanted (male) harmony. So he set up a vocal mike near his computer and sang a harmony line for that. And then another. And then a third. And put them altogether and it sounded fantastic. But I was a bit concerned that it might be too much to go straight from that level of sound to me singing the rest of the chorus alone. So he recorded an “echo” of “are you coming home?” (the second half of the first line), to come after that first line and blend into my next line. And a harmony line for that echo. (I’m starting to think that Adam might have found his calling as a choral director . . .). And then, inspired by how cool that sounded (it really did), he recorded an echo of the echo and harmony for that. We eventually decided to save that second echo for the very last (double) chorus, so as not to overwhelm the chorus from the beginning. I’m excited about how it was sounding by the time I left. Adam didn’t have a chance to do a final mix before I left, so I’ll get the finished version some time next week. And I’ll post it on my website, so check back within the week to hear how it sounds. (And let me know what you think!)