On the evolution of songs...

As we forge ahead with mixing, we’re setting aside some time to play together as a band on a regular basis. This may sound a little odd… after all, we’re a band, and that’s what bands do, isn’t it?

Well, yeah… but when we’re in recording and mixing mode, those activities take priority. (Part of the blessing and the curse of having access to our own studio and self-producing… we immerse ourselves fully in the process.)

I’ve been playing with Organical for nearly 8 years, and one thing that perpetually keeps things interesting is that the songs are always evolving, always changing, always fresh or different. I’m really thankful to be playing with musicians who don’t get too attached to [em]the way things are[/em], and are constantly pushing and exploring, in search of [em]the way things could be[/em]. I thought i’d post a bit on our creative process… how we work on songs as a band, and how they grow and change.

Songs undergo a few “life stages”, and our listeners will be exposed to them at various points along their evolution. Some songs just naturally want to stay the same, but others are very open-ended and seem to have endless opportunities for experimentation inherent in their very structure.

Steve is the main writer in the band, and will bring in new material in various states of completion. Sometimes it’s a riff or a beat that he wants to build around, other times it’s a very fleshed-out arrangement of parts that we learn. But we all have freedom to create or adapt our own parts, grafting them onto the core of the song in various layers.

As we learn and develop the songs, we play them extensively in rehearsal, tweaking arrangements and sounds, offering up suggestions to each other for different parts to play or different sounds to try. No egos involved at all… we’re all mature enough to give and take criticism constructively, so (for the most part) nobody’s nose gets out of joint.

As we prep for a record, the arrangement will generally get locked down and we record the song in that stage of its evolution.

But we don’t stop there.

We all firmly believe that songs are living, breathing entities, and that the recorded version of a song just documents one moment in the life of that song. So once we’ve committed it to a recording and have had a bit of time away from it while mixing, we return to the song with fresh ears as we re-learn material to start playing live again. We don’t allow ourselves to become slaves to the recorded version of the song.

This week was one of those great evolutionary pushes for a few of our the songs we’ve been working on for the new album. Recording is done, so we’re starting to re-learn material for a live set (including a Deftones cover that sounds awesome.) We picked things up surprisingly quickly, and found some new and interesting ways of changing things up a bit, re-imagining the songs without altering them at their deepest levels. Our live set should be very interesting. Some things are going to have to be re-worked a bit on the sample/loop side of things, but that’s something else that’s going to evolve. We sometimes shy away from using the machines on smaller gigs, but we’ve accepted and re-affirmed with ourselves that the machines are a big part of who we are… part of the Organical sound which makes us unique and different. So we’ve made a conscious decision to embrace the machine and integrate it into our live set at every opportunity, wherever it’s appropriate.

The evolutionary process is always fun, and in a way, it makes us the best Organical cover band anywhere!