Last In, First Out

I wrote this song in a flurry of activity late one night. The initial version came together in about an hour and was a trio of rock drums, electric bass, and rhodes piano.

After sleeping on it, I spent far longer trying to refine the performance.

The first realization was that this was not a rock song. It needed to be light and somewhat delicate, so I swapped the rock instruments for jazz ones: drums played with brushes, acoustic bass, and an upright piano. This brought out a much more classy feel that was missing from the first draft.

The bulk of the remaining work was mechanical. My keyboard performance I did at lightning speed for a different instrument was just wrong for piano, and my playing sounded robotic and timid. With the dynamics in all the wrong places, I ended up needing to largely re-record the piano parts for the first half of the song.

I learned a new trick for getting the various parts to fit together with this one. I realized I could change velocities for entire regions at a time, rather than only individual notes. This allowed me to smooth over some pretty jarring loudness differences between sections, and resulted in a more cohesive whole.

Overall, this song now screams jazz hands and I like it.

I had a mental image of a man wandering into a honky-tonk, getting drunk almost immediately and getting tossed out. This gives new meaning to the phrase "last in, first out".