Sunday, January 28, 2018

Day 28: Rock N Roll Bouquet





My good friend Bob Holland and I dipped into some rock & roll history with this fun wedding tune. It took about 5 hours to write and record this from two different states-- we had to work through several technical issues along the way. Please pardon my caterwauling falsetto on the Beach Boys section...

Boring Details: Bob is virtually the guy that got me into music. We met through a mutual friend back in the mid-90s as part of an a cappella X-mas project we were doing because we were too broke to buy gifts for the holidays. Bob and I started writing songs together, but Bob then became Dr. Bob and had to move on to tend to the sick and injured out of state. We recently reconnected in the last couple years and have been working on a musical project about a dysfunctional family reunion.

This song came from an article Bob had read about a wedding performed by an Elvis impersonator. I wanted to add the Beach Boys, partially because what we were coming up with reminded me a little bit of "Good Thing" by Paul Revere & The Raiders, which has both a rougher rock & roll feel with a chorus straight out of a Beach Boys song. Of course, Bob then wanted to add the Beatles, so we suddenly had a song full of rock & roll royalty.

Since Bob lives in Wisconsin, and I'm in Colorado, we had to write this remotely, mostly using FaceTime on our phones. We had to try doing it a couple ways before we could hear both of us playing our instruments at the same time. We also wrote lyrics on a GoogleDoc, which allowed both of us to write on the document at the same time. Once we had the song worked out, I recorded a rough demo on GarageBand and sent an MP3 to Bob, where he added some of his own stuff. I think it came out pretty well considering the time constraint, though I wish I had done a couple more takes on the falsetto parts... but we'll be able to re-record this properly when there's not as much of a time crunch.

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