Ok, full disclosure. Total self-plug here. Spent a lot of time working on something really fun - a gift to fans of Indiana Jones, actually - and I want to share it with you all here. If you want to crank our Indy tribute song while you read the blog, pop this Flash
player window up, or download the
free MP3 here. I give you 'The Ballad of Indiana'.
After the thrill of having our way geeked-out Star Wars-themed tribute song"
Farm Boy" (not only a Star Wars homage, but also a loving nod to our proggy, synth-laden youth) featured on the October 13, 2006 episode of "
The Force-Cast" with Jason and Pete, my childhood friend and bandmate, Glen Nelson (he's an elementary school music teacher and co-founder/vocalist/keyboardist of CT-based family-friendly rock band
Spaghetti Cake and northeastern regional jam-band fave
Flipper Dave) and I felt a calling to return to the genre and write a follow-up tribute song in honor of the new Indy film, "
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull", hitting theaters on May 22nd, 2008. Australia-based Ed Dolista's fantastic podcast "
The
Indy-Cast," focusing on all things 'Jones,' seemed like the perfect place to world premiere our up-tempo rock-pop number written in honor of the good Doctor, and Ed was more than happy to oblidge. The new High Adventure single called "
The Ballad of Indiana" was featured in
Episode 24 of the Indy-Cast, which came out Sunday April 27th. Dolista did a 15 minute
audio interview with Glen and I for the show. If you're an Indy fan and you haven't heard of the show yet, you may want to hit the
RSS feed. The Ballad of Indiana is also being featured tomorrow, state-side, on another hugely popular podcast. Adam Christianson's
The MacCast will be playing the track as its finale for the May 7, 2008 episode. Following is the story of how the song was created.
On the heels of watching "
Raiders of the Lost Ark" and Julie Taymor's Beatle-centric masterwork
"
Across The Universe" on DVD for inspiration, Glen and I put nose to grindstone on March 29, 2008 in my Mac-based home recording studio in the Berkshires of northwestern Massachusetts, for an exhaustive 18-hour, non-stop session, where we wrote and recorded the entire song in one epic sitting. At the beginning of the day, Glen rose early and began blasting out 6 pages of handwritten lyrics in his journal, some fourteen-odd verses that had to eventually be whittled down to three. He read me his lyrical brainstorm over rich, dark, strong coffee, and we knew we had a song in the making. I had mentioned to Glen an idea I had for the hook lyric that dawned on me a day or so before, which was "I'm makin' this up as I go," as it was always one of my all-time favorite Indy lines, as well as being a perennially-embraced philosophy of life for the both of us. Glen had an instinct that the line was great as the hook, but that it needed a preceeding line - something to lead up to that final phrase. Then at the same moment, we both got the idea to look back to the film once again, and it turned out that in the actual dialogue of the scene where that line is from, Indy asks Sallah and Marion to get them passage out on a boat or a plane, and states that he's "going after that truck." "How?" Sallah asks. To which Indy replies off-handedly, "I don't know, I'm makin' this up as I go." At that moment, the hook of the chorus was born. "Ask me 'how?' well, I don't know, I'm makin' this up as I go."
I was eager to break in my newly updated
Logic 8 Pro rig, which is running on a 2.4 GHz 24" iMac with a Lexicon Omega digital audio interface, M-Audio Radeon 61 key MIDI controller and had a brand new AT 4050 microphone just out of the box awaiting the vocals that were to come later that night. The song was actually written, performed and recorded simultaneously and in separate pieces (loops, verse, bridge, chorus, intro), and as soon as any part of the song's structure was decided on, that piece was immediately captured so we could move on and focus on the next section. "Hit Save" was a watch-phrase of the day. I even had my laptop sitting open in the middle of the studio all day long with GarageBand recording everything that went on in the room, lest a fleeting moment of inspiration evaporate before memorization could lock it down and then feebly be supplanted with the scowl of loss and the phrase 'I got nuthin'". This technique proved all-too useful at least a half dozen times throughout the writing phrase, especially in some of my moments of spontaneous melodic vocalizations - not the least of which was the outburst that became part and parcel the elusive second half of the bridge melody. All of the elements were later pieced together, and the form of the song was finally manifested in the wee hours of the morning, at the very end of the writing and recording process! Glen kept talking about how he had never written a song like that before, but it actually helped us to write and record it very quickly, once the words were flowing. In the end, the pieces fit together really well.
I composed two somewhat orchestral ostinato loops in Logic on the piano and Hammond B3 that kind of 're-purpose' melodic phrases from the beloved original John Williams film score. Glen played all the keyboards and drums on the MIDI keyboard, and I was able to really get in there and tweak it all in preparation for the final mix, due to Logic's incredibly flexible editing tools. I played live bass and guitar,
and we laid down all the vocals and harmonies. The pic on the cover of the February '08 "Vanity Fair" was there all day in the studio for moments of inspiration. (Glen later
thanked me by sending me an
Official Pix©
print of "Temple Of Doom" Indy, which now hangs proudly on the wall.) Two weeks later, I began the arduous and detailed process of post production, and all told spent about another 18
hours on editing, tweaking MIDI, deliberating over the final mix, sending WAV files back and forth with Glen, who offered astute notes on each version. On into the final mastering process, there
was a valid debate about whether to take the extra time and effort to tap mixing and mastering ace Don Gunn out in Seattle to give the Logic project the once over. Give it the once over he did,
indeed. After a much-needed revision of a lot of the individual compressions, EQs, channel strip plug in schemes, and even some tonal decisions, Don's expertise brought the final mix to fruition, and a little mastering goes a long way as the track now punches and shines through like it should.
[Glen and I, 'High Adventure', in 1984, a couple of months after 'Temple of Doom' came out.' I literally laugh out loud every time I see this pic...]
For all you musical scholars out there, there are lyrical and musical cues all over the song - beyond just the obvious payoff moment at the end of the track. The classic Indiana Jones main theme is indeed re-rendered here on bagpipes, as a tip of the hat to the Joneses long life of globetrotting as well as the heritage of Sean Connery himself who of course plays Indy's dad in 1989's "The Last Crusade", as an example of the copious internal references. (I won't give them away here, but if you discover any of them, let me know!) The more you listen to the song, the more you're going to pick up. Not a word nor a note was chosen by happenstance. 'The Ballad Of Indiana' is a true labour of love. To go for it here with the cheese factor, it really is a love letter back to those childhood heroes that we have loved so much over the years, and have had so much influence over our lives. From the two of us: 'Thank you George,
Steven, John, Harrison, and of course, Dr. Jones.' Just like everyone's favorite whip-brandishing, jungle-traipsing, Fedora-sporting, idol-pilfering archaeologist compelled us as
pre-teens way back in 1981 to do - we're making this up as we go.
