Putting a song together

We’ve just made a start on a new song for the set list – a well-known barnstormer by Sugarland – and we thought it might be fun to give you a feel for how this process kind of works.

Sometimes, we work stuff up ‘full band’ (I think of our recent additions, ‘My Church’ went that way), but it’s more common for some of us to get together ahead of time and thrash things out. What tends to happen for starters is Mike, Andy and Steve will work through the song from a chart and a recording: sometimes we do this as a group, sometimes we do it separately and then meet up. Quite often, we work from a live version on YouTube, as that tends to provide a good idea of how to condense what can be a lot of parts from scarily good Nashville session musicians into something the six of us can actually play, as well as giving us a feel for starts and ends (too many songs fade out on the recording!). Also, live videos sometimes give you a chance to watch fingerings, capo positions etc.

Separately, Mike and Anne are working on backing vocals. Quite often this involves playing the track in the car on repeat (in the case of “Heads Carolina”, bowling down the Virginia interstate from Fredricksburg to Williamsburg!), and a lot of arguing about who’s stealing whose line, but harmonies are a key part of Americana’s sound, and country in general. Sometimes, we spot a line for Andy as well.

Eventually, the instrumentalists will get together (sometimes with, sometimes without Evonne): this is usually the point at which several things happen:

1. We discover where what we’ve been working on interferes with what someone else has, and adjust things like capos, chord voicing etc. till it all fits;
2. Someone (almost invariably) says ‘did you spot that cool lick/run in the bridge?’, or ‘isn’t it neat how the arrangement is different in verse 3’, and we smack our collective foreheads and tweak things again;
3. We retrieve James off his PC and play him the live video we’ve been working from. James is infuriatingly gifted in that he has a pretty much photographic memory for arrangements and parts, and the odds are it’ll take him two, or at most three, runs through to pretty much completely nail it;
4. Anne adds the ‘fairy dust’ (keyboards etc.);
5. The inevitable debate about ‘pushed chords’ happens. Somewhere in almost every song there are chord changes that happen, by design, just ahead of the beat, rather than on it, to give things a bit of a, well, ‘push’… (“You Don’t Have To Go Home” is littered with them, for example.) Getting this right is often one of the things that turns a song from ‘close’ to sounding really tight.
6. We decide how we’re going to start it (who counts it in etc.) and end it (does the last chord just hang? do we cut it off? do we have a big thrashy ending (“Heads Carolina”)? a tricky stop (“He Thinks He’ll Keep Her”)? or some combination (“YDHTGH”)?)

If Evonne’s with us, or next time she is, we’re now at the point we can run the whole thing through to see what it really sounds like. Often David, our sound engineer, sits in on full band rehearsals, and he’ll take notes of where solos are etc, so he can boost instruments where needed in the front of house mix.

And that’s it. Well, barring the fact that we’ll play it though several times at several rehearsals till it’s good and tight before we let you, the audience, hear it!