Hi Tim,
Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to "Hijacked" and post a thread about it. I appreciate your support very much.
Well in answer to your questions...
The "seed" for "Hijacked" was formed in January this year. I have been writing and recording easy-listening-type material for several years now without much interest from record companies, publishers or management.
I recorded a beautiful song by a massive Carpenters activist and country-singer/songwriter (you probably already know her) Dana Britten-Stein called "They Don't Make Hearts Like Yours Anymore" (with her permission of course). I was really pleased with the sound and I hoped that it might generate some interest. But the general feedback I have gotten up til now has always been that my music is "too nice" and boring - it won't sell.
So knowing I was kind of starting again and attemping to go for a more mainstream sound, my close friend Antony Edwards, who is not a musician but someone who simply has a flair for colourful lyrics (majorly inspired by Madonna!), told me he'd had an idea for a song....at this point he only had the 1st few lines of the verse. They instantly struck me as being fun and kinda cool (!) and I pretty much heard the melody for them in my head straight away.
So I went back home to my piano and worked out the rough melody/chords. Then the next week, Antony and I went and had coffee in a funky little cafe in Windsor (where I live) and wrote the rest of the verse lyrics together (he wrote them, and I suggested ideas and tweaked them so they would fit musically).
At this point though, I did not have a chorus as such - just those descending bass notes you hear. Infact it wasn't until a few weeks after recording began that I wrote the lyrics and formulated the melody for the chorus around those bass passages.
Once I was ready for the recording stage, I cut a guide click/bass/vocal track at my friend Jeff's studio in Staines (near London). Jeff, who plays guitar on the finished recording is an absolutely outstanding guitarist - although he is very modest about it! I only play a little guitar myself so he is a GOD as far as I am concerned!
So then I took a CD cut of my guide track to another studio I use in Guildford. My co-producer Dave Hyde and I used the CD as a template and started taking sampled drum loops, finding out what rhythms we liked and adding them to the template.
Once the drum loops, rythmn synth's and clavi-sounds were in place, I got Jeff to play the lead guitar and bass live (although I used synth bass in the end to give it a more "dance" feel).
A few weeks later I added the lead vocals (which are doubled tracked in the verse-bridge, and doubled tracked twice again an octave higher in the chorus).
The real fun was in the mixing session though! Dave and I added the filtered effect (when the music sounds like it's behind a wall and then fades in gradually), the "radio" effect on the verse vocal, and then put my voice through a vocoder to give it that electronic/robotic sound you hear in the last chorus. We cut and pasted various vocal phrases from the chorus to serve as dance-like ad libs. Then the track was mastered. All in all, it took us approx six 4-6 hour sessions in the studio to complete the track. I pay for it all myself, so I only record as and when I can afford it (which is not as often as I would like!).
But overall, I am happy with the final result. It seems to be going down better than the "softer" material I have recorded. It sounds more fun and alive somehow. The words really don't mean very much - it's just designed to be a cheeky, catchy, toe-tapping song.
Anyway, I think that pretty much covers it! Again - thank you Tim for taking an interest. Any support you guys give me is extremely valuable. I am hoping to get management interest with a view to launching a more mainstream career. So if you like it spread the word! I have just started work on my next track, so I hope you will take a look at my profile again sometime to check it out. THANK YOU - TIM. Leo
