How Time Slips Away (Sneaky Creatures).

I am tempted to talk about the heat and how it’s been keeping me up at night. What an inconvenience (73º/Partly Cloudy). Pop over to weather.com and look at the forecast for Baghdad: today was 112º with ‘widespread dust’. Those people over there on our behalf deserve a lot more than our thanks for fighting that joke of a war. I can’t imagine mowing a lawn in this heat - forget about combat in 112º. (How about this opportunistic gem. Not a bad idea, actually).

On the (much) lighter side, the inability to sleep has forced me to confront some of the things still undone with these songs. Despite a lack of drive to do so, I opened up ‘Sneaky Creatures’ and, as I did so, noticed that it was first begun on June 19th, 2006 - a year ago, almost to the day. It’s one of those tough songs where everything is working together perfectly in a very particular way, so whatever I add has to be very consistent with that. I pulled up the same sounds - an analog sine wave processed to sound a bit like an organ, a kalimba, goat toes (you know, the percussion) - and struggled with where I wanted the song to go. My instinct (broken, useless tool that it is) had me breaking things down and turning the middle eight into a sort of pause in the middle of the song. This is exactly the kind of thing I’m fighting against on this record. I decided to try to get some sleep and see how things sounded to me in the morning.

Woke up this morning, listened to what I’d done right away. Shite. Total shite. I’ll have to try again soon. Sometimes it just does not happen. The whole song is working in this ‘minor’ groove and then the bridge part comes in and sounds like a reflective moment from a children’s movie.

I knew this song would be one of the ones we struggled with, but I’m not really any closer now than I was a year ago…

RYAN