Day 3

Much, much better today. We got three lots of drums done, on 'Downhill', 'The Top' and 'The Tame Lions'. 

'Downhill' is another possible album opener. It's probably the tune that best represents the new direction we've taken the songs in. It features what I thought was a subtle yet daring key change into the middle 8 but Thomas referred to it as the 'Devil's Chord Change' (Moving from C to F sharp apparently makes me one of the Horned One's sweaty minions). It's very big sounding and it tears along at a fair old lick, with some tough and, dare I say it, flamboyant playing. Flamboyant in this sense means self-indulgent, I expect.  Any road, we nailed it in two takes and felt extremely pleased with ourselves. 

Harder to get right was 'The Top'. This is quite an old one that I wrote on the piano in a rehearsal room upstairs in a theatre in Blackheath about ten years ago. We've reinvented it as a Supertramp number played by the Who. It's very fast. It rocks. It's also five minutes long at the moment. I envisage some kind of much, much shorter 'radio edit' making the album. Thomas thinks the two minute wig out at the end is ripe for cutting. I don't see it myself. We attempted takes either side of lunch and had to take regular breaks so we didn't break Sam on the drums. Later we learned that Thomas had marked the second take as the best one. Oh dear.  We're going to have another go on Monday morning to see if we can better it when we're a bit fresher. Incidentally, Sam had a titanic day behind the kit. He seems to get better and better the longer the session lasts. I'm a lucky fella. 

Finally, after destroying ourselves comprehensively with a rocker, we moved on to one of the album's slower tunes, 'The Tame Lions'. It's a song about childhood and how simple objects around you can fire the imagination when you're a kid. Musically, it's a bit quirky and reflective, opening and closing with soft Rhodes chords and jazzy brushwork. Again, Sam did some great work. He's a closet (well, not so closet) jazzer with a few big band tours of Europe under his belt. We did it in two goes, one on brushes and one on sticks. A nice soft way to bring proceedings to a halt before our day off. 

On the subject of the day off, it's very welcome. I knew we'd had too much music when we had to turn one of the speakers off in the pub afterwards because the beat was upsetting us. 

On the subject