Album   $5
There were 3 songs on our sixth cassette album that involved a LOFI echo technique. This was one. The lyrics from the original are all included, but some extra have been added.
pop rock
Artist picture
pop, classic rock, old pop, beatles
In my teens, I wrote songs like a madman. In one year, when I was 16, I produced 11 albums worth of material. During the 6 year period between my 16th and 21st year, I produced approximately 700 songs. I have a hard time believing that figure myself, but at one point in my early twenties I counted them up and it came out to something slightly in excess of that figure. Since I've long since lost all the recordings and most of the written documentation, I can't go back and check the figures any longer. Now, admittedly, much of the material was truly, utterly terrible! It had to be; I started writing with a guitar in hand before I knew how to play chords! In fact, the first four albums were all noise, some of it very interesting noise -- at least we thought so. I say WE because I wasn't working alone; my best friend Steve MacKay was my partner in musical mayhem. Our band was called Garbage and that pretty much says it all. In fact, we knew we were horrible and reveled in the fact. Our attitude towards our music was interesting. We thought we were geniuses, but we also were scornful. The attitude was similar to how we felt about movies. We loved cheese. Japanese horror movies, Charlie Chan flicks -- anything horrible, we loved. As to our recordings, I knew every nuance of sound on those early tapes intimately well, because I listened to them endlessly. The first track we recorded was called Toilet Symphony. It had three principal parts. The first involved these soaring electronic sound effects we had recorded at The Ontario Science Centre; the second part involved sounds and music speeded up four or five times, so that it sounded like the flickering tinkling of a wind chime. The final portion was a native choral group chanting. You can see why that track -and indeed most of those tracks - are not now in existence.
Song Info
Genre
Pop Dance-Pop
Charts
Peak #157
Peak in subgenre #61
Author
W Cameron Bastedo
Rights
W. Cameron Bastedo
Uploaded
January 28, 2022
Track Files
MP3
MP3 4.9 MB 320 kbps 2:09
Lossless
WAV 43.3 MB
Story behind the song
The lyrics sound like an adult reflecting on his youth, and in verse 2 that's the case -- those words have been added. However, the interesting thing is that the disillusioned sentiment expressed in verse one are the words I wrote when I was 16. I had lost faith in God, was rejoicing in self-pity, and was nearly nihilistic. As to the production, in the original, the echo was achieved by recording the song, duplicating the song, and then playing it on two separate machines, a micro-second apart, while recording it on a third machine. However, it never did work perfectly because the machines ran at slightly different speeds, so that the echo gradually became more pronounced. Life with cassette recording! On this recording, I slid a second copy of each track (except the bass) 1/8th of a bar out of sync to achieve an effect very close to the original.
Lyrics
I'm just an shadow of my former self, An insufficient echo, stuck up on a shelf. I'm just a whisper of a former dream, A photo negative, still living me me. You'd think by now that I would realize: Life don't matter when you're gonna die! I'm a reminder of forgotten truth, Things I'd forgotten, but were said in my youth. These are just echoes of my former self, Something I'd neglected, but I found here on this shelf. You'd think by now I'd forget to recall: What's lost in the past doesn't matter at all.
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