"The Well of Friendship" - my second single and video premiere May 19th!

Cafe Society
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Hi, everyone! I wanted to let you know that my second single, “The Well of Friendship”, premieres today, Friday, May 19th.

You can find it on BandCamp, Apple Music, Spotify, and other streaming services as of 12 noon EDT.

And - the video for “The Well of Friendship” will premiere on YouTube at 12 noon as well. Please join me at this link - The Well of Friendship (Official Music Video) - YouTube .

All this is leading up to the release of my first album, “Old Enough to Know Better”, coming out later this summer!

I want to thank fellow Dopers for their support - I really appreciate it!

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Pretty nice, from both me and allthegood. Had it queued up for over a week before finally giving it a listen. Just as it was starting to feel a bit repetitive you sampled lyrics from the Beatles and ran in a slightly different direction which gave it more texture and variation. Positive and joyful. Not overproduced and synthetic-sounding. Wish you luck.

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Enjoyed this one as well. I also thought the Beatles “reference” was clever. And once again, a wonderful message.

Just curious, how long did it take to record this?

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That’s a very tough question, actually, because we recorded all eight songs for the album in the same blocks of time. Sorry, this might be a long, rambling answer…

I’m actually a solo artist, so all of these songs first existed (and continue to exist) as just me and guitars, live. I asked Jessica Stuart to produce the album and gave her pretty much free reign over the arrangements. She suggested Ryan Granville-Martin as recording engineer. That meant that I was on guitars, bass, penny whistle, and lead/backing vocals, my producer could cover guitars, bass, backing percussion and backing vocals, while my recording engineer could cover drums, percussion, and backing vocals.

The other big challenge was that all three of us are working professional musicians with a lot of stuff on the go - Jessica is the driving force behind the Jessica Stuart Few, the Jessa pop project, and the Joan Beckow Legacy recording project. Ryan is the first-call drummer for the ‘Classic Albums Live’ concert series, as well as the vocalist who does all the Roger Waters songs whenever they do Pink Floyd live. And I’ve got a career as an actor/musician/singer.

So if I’m remembering it right - we recorded the bed tracks on guitar first, in 5 or 6 sessions in January, 2022. Ryan recorded the drum / percussion tracks on his own after that. (Not the usual order of doing things, but I wanted him to have the freedom of responding to what I was doing, instead of not getting any choice about what was going over top of him.) Then we recorded the scratch vocals, and called it quits for that stretch.

Ryan toured for most of February, I had some concerts with the Elmer Iseler Singers, a 20 voice chamber choir, in early March, interspersed with recording the bass tracks. I was all set to record the bass tracks on Monday, March 14, but I came down with Covid on Friday, March 11, and I was laid flat on my back for 2 weeks. Even when I was symptom-free, it was 6 more weeks where I was too tired to function. Jessica recorded the bass tracks in my place - I think it ended up that I’m playing bass on 2 - 3 of the tracks, she’s the bass on all the others.

Anyway, by early April, we had all the instrumental tracks, including our external musicians (John Sheard on keys on six tracks, Anh Phung on flute on three tracks, Jacob MacCauley on bodhrán, Christopher Daws on piano, Loren Vidre on fiddle for one track) all done. I think that took a total of 8 or 9 days. Then, I went to Québec to sing Leporello in ‘Don Giovanni’ for L’Opéra de Québec.

We then laid down the vocal tracks in the first two weeks of June - maybe another 6 sessions, and then, I took off to do Sir Toby in ‘Twelfth Night’ for the St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival. Meanwhile, Ryan did the mixes, and Fedge did the mastering by the second week of August, while I was doing Bartolo in ‘Barber of Seville’ for the Montréal Italian Festival.

From there, I’ve been working with a website designer, a graphic designer, a digital marketing team, and a publicist to get the rest of it all together. This is the part of the project that I really suck at, and so it has taken me ages. Plus I had to juggle it around an actor/muso production of ‘Man of La Mancha’, playing Antonio/covering Bartolo in the Canadian Opera Company production of ‘Marriage of Figaro’, subbing as a bass soloist with the Fairlawn church choir, and the Atlantic Canada tour of the Elmer Iseler Singers.

And I’ve been organizing the videos. There are two more singles (with videos) to release on June 24th (“Nous”), and July 21 (“Follow your Silence”), with the album release scheduled for August 25 (“Old Enough to Know Better”). And all that’s juggled around my current show “Memories Beyond the Grave”, an Elmer Iseler Singers tour in July, and my role debut as Don Pasquale in “Don Pasquale”, for this years ItalFestMtl.

So if I had to take a wild guess at it, “The Well of Friendship” took at least 40 hours in the studio to get the bed guitar track, scratch vocal track, drum track, bass track, atmospheric guitar track for the bridge, and the vocal tracks, plus another 10 hours of mixing and mastering.

And I don’t want to know how much it cost until I have to know… :smiley:

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Very interesting! Thanks for the info. With the lengthy, start now, end later, multiple musicians, did you use click tracks to keep everything together?

Who wrote the backing stuff—bass lines, etc.? The producer? Each musician? How much is arranged head of time, how much is improvised?

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Good question! All of it was done to a click, but in some places, the click had to be pre-programmed because of time changes or rall./accels. ‘Energize’ (third track, which won’t be released until the album is released) was particularly tricky, as it uses a slow 6/8, a fast 4/4 and a double-time 6/8 that are almost the same value for the eighth note all the way through (but not quite!). That one was hard for me to rehearse before going into the studio, because there wasn’t one metronome mark that would serve for all three tempi - double-time 6/8 over regular 6/8 gives you a 2 against 3 that’s fun, but it doesn’t contribute to the accuracy…

Arrangements - it depends on which part. Ryan pretty much made up his own drum and percussion parts, and we picked and chose our favourite bits.

Jessica and I worked out the bass parts together - some of it was improvised in the studio, but most of it was worked out in advance. She’s a better bass player than I am - I still over-play a lot, but there’s much of what I came up with that we went with. The bass part in the bridge of ‘The Well of Friendship’ was my idea, but she sculpted it down to something manageable. Then I got sick, and she played it. There’s other parts of the album where I’m a little confused now as to who was playing at what point. I do remember switching back and forth on a couple of numbers, which was odd - I often play bass in drop ‘D’, and she doesn’t - so we had to constantly re-tune between passes. ‘The Well of Friendship’ is all her, as I was unconscious for most of that day; ‘So Lost without You’ is both of us playing different parts. The part for ‘The Best Day of My Life’ (getting released with the album) was full of parallel 10ths, and that’s one of my favourite things to do on the bass; it’s also why I like to play in drop ‘D’.

Anh on flute - I’ve never met her face to face. We just sent her the tracks with a click, and she took a couple of passes on her own, from her home studio. We then picked and chose (and re-mixed) what she sent us.

John on keys - he came into the studio with his B3 emulator, and used Ryan’s Fender Rhodes. He just improvised in front of Ryan and Jessica - I was still testing positive, so I was connected by Skype and gave my opinions.

Jacob and Chris recorded their parts in their home studios from files with a click track. Loren came in - she had the main fiddle tune in advance, and then we had her improvise a bunch of stuff.

The lead vocals were worked out in advance, but tweaked a bit - it was strange for me to have the extra freedom of recording the vocals without playing the guitar at the same time. The backing vocals, we just made up on the spot.

With the acoustic instruments, we had a combination of DI and floor mics, to really capture the characteristics of each guitar. Bass went DI into the board, keys were amped and DI, electric guitars were DI. I think Anh, Jacob, and Chris were just miced, Loren was both miced and DI.

Ryan’s drum room is a thing to behold - crowded as fuck, but everything is set up exactly the way the drummer and recording engineer want it!

Fun detail - I breathe very audibly when I play, so the thing we found that saved a bunch of takes was to wrap a guitar slide in broccoli elastics and I held it in my teeth. Something about breathing through the tube instead of my nose or my mouth meant you couldn’t hear my breathing through the floor mics. We very quickly started coming up with rude names for it…

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Very interesting background! Would love to have been a fly on the wall. Thanks for sharing.

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In case anyone is interested, the lyric videos are now up for both songs. For a fun twist, I’ve added the chord symbols for anyone who wants to play along at home!

Here’s “So Lost without You” - So Lost without You - Lyric Video - YouTube

…and here’s “The Well of Friendship” - The Well Of Friendship - Lyric Video - YouTube .

Let me know what you think - I’d be interested to hear from anyone who does try singing/playing along…

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Congratulations! :smiley: