Making Mountains

An Uphill Process

It always starts with a prompt.

I haven’t been able to write many songs—let alone anything—without some limit or guideline, either self-imposed or specified by a cohort or boss. Deadlines are especially motivating.

I’ve been in a songwriting group for years now, off and on, and when “on,” I’m tasked with throwing together some jam in a week or less. Here’s a little about one of those weeks, and one of those jams:

The prompt for the week was Mountains* When I received it, I had been vacationing at my cousins’ home in Pacific Palisades (RIP), and had just acquired the software instrument BBC Symphony Orchestra. As the name implies, it’s a sampling of the actual BBC Symphony, and boy are those some crack musicians. It’s fun to score for an entire orchestra when you have little idea what you’re doing and don’t have forty to one-hundred professional classical players sighing impatiently while rolling their eyes at you. I came up with an ostinato, dark string passage, somewhere between Forget About Dre and Kashmir, if I had to come up with an analogy in the time it took to write this sentence. I then threw on some sampled drums, which clearly made it a rock song, because drums rock.

Holed away in my cousins’ guest house, I still didn’t feel at liberty to sing at the top of my lungs, so I softly crooned at the bottom of them, hunched over my laptop microphone. The result was an oddly restrained delivery, countering the throbbing epic-ness of the track.

A couple of years later, I retooled the track at Studio 601 in Austin with engineers and owners Mike Ingber and Eric Harrison, who also stepped as the rhythm section. I should be clear, these guys are as crack as those BBC Orchestra cats, except on drums and bass. They’ve since been my go-to players on many of the songs I continue to record at their place.

Mountains of gold

Turquoise sea

Platinum moon

Why you ruining me with

Promises

Promises

Here’s a sample. The rest is out April 30^th on most platforms. You can pre-save it HERE.

*in this case, the “prompt” could be used in any way one chose, e.g. a song title, part of a lyric, a mood, etc.