Last weekend was my first wedding anniversary. We didn’t really have big plans to exchange gifts but I thought it would be a good opportunity to finally record “Our Story”, the song I used to propose to Eileen. I had been meaning to do this for a while, partially because I knew if I didn’t I’d probably forget how to play it and that would make me a terrible husband.
If you don’t want to read all my thoughts on recording the song feel free to just go listen to it now. I’ll only be a little offended.
This song was written to be played live, only on acoustic, and has some holds that feel pretty loose so I had to start off by making sure I could actually play it with backing drum track. It took me a few tries to get the feel of it but I think it came together without sounding too rigid.
After recording the acoustic part, I got to have a lot of fun writing all the other things that go on top. I had a lot of fun with the bass and actually mixed some of the low end out of the acoustic to give the bass more room. The piano in the chorus really came together pretty nicely, particularly the hits under “I can’t wait to write…”. The left hand work there gave it some good body.
As usual, I was tempted to do more electric guitar noodling than I should but some after some editing I was pretty happy with the little theme I had in the verses. The lead part in the choruses ended up acting as more of a harmony that gave the chords an interesting sound at times.
There’s a part in the 3rd verse right after the line “together with our furry child” where it sounds like someone just stepped on a piano. That’s because the cat just stepped on the piano there. Since the line was actually about him I mixed it down but left it in.
The outro was interesting in this song. It was originally the verse or chorus of an early draft of this song that never really panned out, but I liked the lyrics and it was in the same key as the rest of the song so I really wanted to make it work. Also it was a nice held chord segue into actually popping the question, which was pretty important at the time.
I wanted to be sure this still sounded cohesive with the rest of the song, but still go out big and I think it turned out well. While I could have mixed it a little better, the pick slide into distorted power chords is just a lot of fun. The piano part was just something simple I stumbled on while I was messing around, but I really like what it adds. I ended up doing a lot of editing to decide which instruments should stop when and I’m happy with those choices. There was a lot of value in editing this song a few days after I had done most of the recording.
All in all, I was really happy with how this turned out and Eileen seemed to like it too. It’s always fun to record original music and this song was particularly important to me.