Upon the rocks where the winter waves dash
Along the shoreline with its twinkle lightning flash
It all happened a long song ago
When we were drifting, our powder running low
And all the while you were waiting on the drum
But nowt to hear but the sad and dirty hum
All dressed up in your bright blue uniform
Before the mast and waiting for the storm
And when it came it hit just like a fist
The bow it buckled, and broke just like a stick
We were tossed high into the air
Our mouths were gagged by wind and rain and hair
And all the while you were waiting on the drum
But nowt to hear, but the sad and dirty hum
All dressed up in your bright blue uniform
Before the mast, and waiting for the storm
The morning after, the waters still and slow
Just a little debris in the ebb and flow
No sign of bodies, and no sign of blood
All hand were lost, taken down to the mud
And all the while you were waiting on the drum
But nowt to hear but the sad and dirty hum
All dressed up in your bright blue uniform
Before the mast and waiting for the storm
In 2012 to coincide with the release of the Hollow Gravity LP I recorded a session of nautically inspired instrumentals for Daniel Blumin on WFMU. One of the tracks “Running The Rigging” is a lively number using the MFB Nanozwerg and the Rota-Synth sequencer. It has a crashing through the waves, tossed on the high seas feel, and over the years I have returned to it adding more sonic layers, but to no real effect as after a while it seemed to merely drown out the riff.
One approach I did try in 2013 was to add a vocal line with sea shanty phrasing. This was well before the shanty became all the rage in the pandemic, but even back then I wasn’t convinced that it wasn’t a tad contrived. Last year (I don’t give up do I) I tried again but this time instead of more atonal noise I added a simple set of chords. This provided the foundation for a verse/chorus structure. I kept a nautical theme to the lyrics borrowing the title of one of the other WFMU session tracks as a chorus lynchpin. The three verses are a relatively simple tale of a boat and all hands lost at sea with the chorus returning us repeatedly to a figure “all dressed up in your bright blue uniform, before the mast and waiting for the storm”. Is it a metaphor for something, for the pandemic, for impending doom, tempting but I’m not sure that it is.
Once a song structure was in place and the BPM established extra musical parts could be added and there is veritable orchestra of vibes, piano, brass, strings, scaffold poles (from an old improv session) and other sundry noises. There were so many tracks that I ran into those mixing dilemmas they earnestly discuss in muso magazines and on line. Basically you reach a point of having to decide which instruments to foreground and which to leave in a supporting role. So one may have a great vibe pattern, but even though it is counterpointing the strings, and in a different register to the brass not everything can be equally loud, and even with all the compression gizmos in the world pushing the vibes (for example) ultimately means making something else less audible. So you have to choose which child to sacrifice.
As an aside I think Tom Jones would make a decent fist of covering this track, one could just imagine him belting it out with that voice of his as the waves lash the deck in the accompanying video. Probably be a number one.
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