Zimbabwean Dollar - WIP Rough Mix parts 1-2
A first rough cut of the first and second parts of the track Zimbabwean Dollar, of of the upcoming album FracTales due out in 2018. Its a sort of blend of old school Prog Rock, Funk, Latin Jazz.
Check out the artist page.
Stream all 1 songs for free.
Story behind the song
The idea came about many years ago while going through some old Jack Bruce recordings. I stumbled onto his "A Question of Time" album and on it he did a rework of an older tune called "Hey Now Princess". This track had Ginger Baker on drums, and he gave it this polyrythmic, afrobeat groove which I thought was really cool. I had wanted to try my hand at doing a prog/funk/fusion record, so that showed a nice blend of those genres. Using that song as a primer, I had the basic rhythm down in like ten minutes.
The chorus came much later. "Hey Now Princess" does not have a true chorus, at least nothing that feels like the verse is resolving to something, and I wanted to make Zim Dollar have some more conventional structure dynamics, so I wanted a real chorus, but no idea where to go. I stumbled on to the chord progression by accident, you could say that it was lifted from Steely Dan's "Peg" in that its a chromatic descending progression of Major and Minor 7ths. I thought my chorus sounded like cheesy music from "The Price is Right" for some reason, but it works!
The guitar line at the beginning was also by accident. I was trying to learn the riff to Aqualung by ear. Basically, I screwed it up and played the Zimbabwean Dollar riff instead. I liked the mistake too much to let it go, so put it to tape, and shelved it for a future project. The guitar riffs through the bulk of this cut was basically my best Nile Rogers/Jimmy Nolen impression. I thought if I could get that Chic type sound, with a super clean, highly compressed, jingly tone that would work so well for this. The guitar arpeggio during the chorus is what I thought Steve Howe would sound like in the James Brown band.
The Jazz part at the end of this cut came about when I was holed up with a sprained ankle. During that time I wrote some Jazz flavored pieces, and one of them I thought could be a good transition into the long bridge of Zim Dollar. I've always liked it, its a tiny passage but changes the mood dramatically but not in an abrupt way.
Lyrics
The official lyrics will be released at a later time. Suffice to say the main theme is the cycle of political revolution. The idea that when a revolutionary movement deposes a particularly nasty tyrant-esque ruler, often the new tyrant comes from within the revolutionary faction, and so the cycle must repeat itself with yet another revolution. It is therefore illustrating that human sociopolitical systems are in a state of eternal revolution, never to end, never to be perfected.
