Carrying On Cranky

This is the third in a series of articles I’m writing about the songs in apocrypha, a compilation album I am publishing on DMusic. It is meant to complement my Jamendo album, evolution.

OK, by now you’ve noticed everything has a huge story behind it. Not this song.

One day, I was in a really bad mood. Normally, I come up with a concept for each song, then fill in the gaps of rhythm, melody, and harmony as I go. It is slow going. Every once in a while, I break free and play something that’s just completely improvised and flashy; this is one of those times.

“Carrying On Cranky” was a term used by Susan Ivanova in the TV series Babylon 5. Indeed, I was doing so that day. I banged out that crazy, call-and-response conga drum pattern, ran over it with a slap bass line in G minor, put in the “response” in Hammond organ form, and blues guitar’ed the rest away. Midway through the song, I switched to the organ for melody and funk guitar scratching for response. Finally, just to shoot one final three pointer, I modulated to another key for the guitar reprise (A minor).

Mixdown was a nightmare. My wife asked me, one day, why I was spending so much time setting up my room to play bass. I told her “There’s a sound I like in bass; I call it the chocolate sound, dark and rich. There’s another sound I hate, which I just call twonky. The strings go twonk, twonk, twonk.”

Well, slap bass loses a lot of that bottom end. This made the song hard to mix–too much, and the bass ran over the melody; too little, and it got lost behind the wailing guitar. Live and learn. Though I usually get a kick out of this song, I can say I’ve learned why the guitar on “Bop Gun (Endangered Species)” by Parliament is in so high an octave–to make room for the rest of the song.