Radio Angel (Some June)

 

The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise - Giovanni di Paolo 1445

It's always interesting to review the evolution of a piece. This one started on an acoustic guitar using only the working title Silent Satellite. As I was tracking it and doing the synth parts, I came upon a patch titled Radio Angel and it fit perfectly with what I was doing, and is now the final title.

Harmonically it's interesting because it uses minor keys a minor third apart (B minor and D minor) and both the relative and parallel modes, so D major and D minor. B major could possibly work as well in a more angular way.

"Silent satellite" is still in the lyrics so I thought that was a good solution. As I got deeper into tracking the piece it began to gather more meaning. Very often while I'm in the middle of recording all the other parts, I may stumble on a new acoustic guitar part. I've gotten into the habit of having the "camera" armed and ready to take a "snapshot" of something passing by and capture it immediately, then resume what I was doing. The organ part at the beginning was informed by the title change but remained within the "silent satellite" idea/metaphor. The acoustic guitar part at the end was a "new original" as a spin-off and I made it a kind of etude. And I've added the new acoustic guitar spin-off which was a new original and a Video 45 as well.

When you're in a creative flow you can do things out-of-order, and create new "nodes" for new seed ideas (or "seed from the fruit" as Rick Rubin calls it), or loop back to the beginning to modify the seed idea for a sense of closure. The example I always cite are the sculptures of Tony Smith, a minimalist sculptor from the 1960s whose works are based on shape primitives (hexagons, octagons, and so on). He had an interesting way of working where he would go back almost to the beginning of the project and complete it by making the preliminary drawings, which in music has historically been notating it on manuscript paper. The common notion is that the artist starts with a sketch and it evolves linearly from that point to where it was actually fabricated and installed, but in Tony Smith's case, for the work to be completely resolved, it needed the "original" sketch. That's how I work as well: a piece will evolve and get elaborately produced, then once it's finished I'll realize I never wrote the chords down, or it never had a good acoustic guitar part standing on its own as the "original".

You can do things out of order. We think that things should proceed linearly (and they should from an engineering perspective) but in other things, you can rearrange the sequence until it has the ultimate shape you want, then make the drawing as if it was the seed idea. It's the "GMO" of creativity.

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To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just redo it, redo it, redo it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.--Kevin Kelly

(But it's also interesting that Rod Serling never did rewrites. It could have been that spontaneous ideas were immediately incorporated).

Main Mix:

  

Organ Version:

 

Guitar "Etude" (Video 45): 

 

 Just the Bass Video: