Track 11: Your Time

Anchor Blog Series: Entry #11

https://soundcloud.com/zammuto/11-your-time

This is the last track on the LP and it is about death (as last tracks often are).  I certainly don’t mean it to be depressing.  In fact, death’s inevitability has always filled me with wonder in a way that enriches my day to day.  Thinking about it always brings me to the realization that I don’t know much of anything.  The most basic facts about what is really going on here are a total mystery.  As Alan Watts said, “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what. That is what our knowledge amounts to.” 

 
Lyrics:

sooner later gonna meet your maker 
oh yes sir, gonna meet her

what you do between now and then
gonna make it easy, gonna make it hard

everything you’ve seen, everyone you’ve met
some you can’t remember, some you can’t forget

forever days or forever nights
will it fade to black or will it fade to white

sooner later gonna be you time
maybe not today, but someday
maybe not tomorrow, but someday

you could look at it all your life
and never understand it, never understand

sooner later gonna be your time

sooner later gonna meet your maker 
oh yes sir, gonna meet her

forever days or forever nights
will it fade to black or will it fade to white

what you are, what you believe
what will you take, what will you give

I recorded the lyrics at home and then recorded Daniela’s harmony in Toronto on my visit there in February.  She has an amazing ear for harmony and we were able to hone in on a nice development pretty quickly.  I used the PCM81 to post process the vocals and push them back in space at the end of each stanza.  I met Daniela through my wife’s sister, who was a schoolmate of hers.  I heard a demo she made in college and was blown away, and it’s taken a while for the collaboration to come about, but I’m so happy to have her contribution on this record.  She and her husband Dan Goldman have a band called Snowblink.  Check out their record ‘Long Live’ (to start), it’s incredible.


The instrumental part of the track started with the main keyboard loop, which I improvised on the Nord with that clicky vintage synth sample from ‘Need Some Sun’. I played it through a ping pong delay and reverb with a long pre-delay.  Then I filtered it in various ways using the midi sync feature of the Electrix Filter Factory.  The background drone is based on the original Mellotron glass harmonica samples from the vast Nord collection.  A pitched down version of these worked well for the baseline.  The kick was filtered through the Vermona Retroverb to give it a bit of warmth and depth.  The violin parts were multi-tracked by Gene Back during his visit last fall.  I lined them up and low-pass filtered them together through the Filter Factory like the main key part.

There is an instrumental bonus track, called ‘Codebreaker’, that I’ll share tomorrow, (sort of an afterlife.)

The East Coast Tour begins Sunday Night, October 26th in NYC:

New York - Philly - DC - Durham - Atlanta - Asheville - Nashville - Louisville - Cincinnati - Columbus - Buffalo - Boston - North Adams, MA 

Please spread the word.

Yours,

Nick

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