"Wouldn't It Be?"
Throw some pennies, hope that any moment you appear
Bob and I continued to demo new tracks and pass them back and forth, and in 2004 we decided to go back to 609 Recording in Bedford, Ohio, a studio owned and operated by producer and engineer, Don Depew. Don has since sold 609 and focused on his gig at Dr. Z Amplification, but in its day he kicked some monster tracks out of that studio, engineering and producing (sometimes playing in) bands such as Guided by Voices, Cobra Verde and New Bomb Turks.
We had recorded 12 tracks at 609 for a disk we called “This is Where We Are” in 2003. Don’s work blew us away — he “got” the sound we were after. We wanted to record again in 2004 but felt we only had enough worthy tunes to track an EP. It wound up being the last time we recorded with one another.
One of the five tracks was one of mine, “Wouldn’t it Be?”
I do a ton of media training in my line of work, prepping spokespeople to cope with aggressive news media interviews. It’s taken me to far-flung locales such as Kuala Lumpur and Amsterdam. For seven years, I traveled all over the U.S. facilitating media training for Nokia. It was the turn of the 21st century, and mobile telephony was catching fire with consumers all over the world. Nokia was a trailblazer, with more that 35% of the global handset market. I helped them figure out how to talk about their new products — particularly a new mobile phone model they loaded with a camera, of all things (!)
At the time, their North American headquarters was in Irving, Texas, and I found myself flying into Dallas almost every month and staying in the airport Marriott. I’d grind out back-to-back training sessions a week at a time. I’d wake up, take a shuttle bus to their headquarters, train two groups of folks for eight hours, then head back to the Marriott and wait for the next day.
Pretty lonely. I desperately missed my girlfriend (whom I’d been married to for 20+ years by that time). I started thinking of all the ways I could summon her there.
I could close my eyes and wish she’d appear. Say a prayer. Snap my fingers like a magician. Throw pennies into a fountain and make a wish.
I wrote it all down and had the start of a song:
WOULDN'T IT BE?
Close my eyes and make a wish and
It's just you and I
Snap my fingers and from half-a-world away
You're mine
Say a silent prayer and out of nowhere
You are here
Throw some pennies, hope that any
Moment you'll appear.
Wouldn't it be lovely?
I had the melody right away. Sang my scratch lyrics into the recording app on my mobile handset so I wouldn’t forget (this was my usual process. Hum some melody snippet into the phone, then work out the full tune once I got back to my recording gear).
It’s the only “clean” (non-distorted) guitar work on the resulting EP, which we called “Release Me.” I came up with a riff to open the tune that had a whisper of reverb and chorus, an effect I loved (and continue to love). The riff resolves into a hook that has a touch of Herman’s Hermits’ version of “There’s a Kind of Hush.” Listen to Peter Noone’s vocal line when he gets to “…people just like us are falling in love.”
No idea how my subconscious dredged that one up — I’m not particularly a fan of Herman’s Hermits, but I heard a lot of that tune on WIXY-1260 AM, the legendary ‘60s rock radio station in Cleveland. I blasted WIXY into my brain every night on a tiny silver transistor radio I secreted under my pillow so I wouldn’t have to hear my mother and father’s nightly scream fests after I’d gone to bed. Heard a lot of the ‘60s that way.
Bob, as always, added some lovely backing vocals, including a little scat thing — singing “dit-dit-dits” under part of the main melody line. I loved it. Of course, I knew it was a nod to Jon Anderson, whose hippie-dippie metaphysical lyrics and vocals we carefully dissected and learned like possessed acolytes with each Yes album release.
I realized I could layer that “dit-dit-dit” backing line with the chorus and add a third part — the harmony backing vocals you hear at the end of the track (“…wouldn’t it be fine, it’s so fine; wouldn’t it be nice, it’s so nice; holding you so tight through the night.”) Together, it winds up being a polyphonic “round,” kinda like the end of Todd Rundgren’s “Just One Victory,” or the chorus of “Good Vibrations.”
As with most of our tunes that fade out, Bob’s drumming gets more intense as the fade progresses. Check out the violent crash cymbals punctuating the last few bits of music, all on the upbeats. Wow. I once asked him why he saved some of his coolest and most daring drum fills for the fade. His logic:
“If I screw it up, you hardly hear it.”
NEXT TIME: Brushes with greatness — how rock stars reacted to the “Release Me” EP.
by Fencl/Walker © 2004 It's Yours? Music