First blog ever and the lowdown on upcoming Cerise album
Firstly, I enjoy listening to an artist's whole album to get a sense of what they're on about. Too often I've been disappointed by an artist that has a few hot singles but no real body of work. Naturally there will always be the outstanding tracks but the whole album should have a certain weight for an artist to have legitimacy in my eyes.
I like to place what I think are my best tracks in order from best to good on my albums. So you know that if you've only listened part of the way through the album you've still the best tracks to that point, though not everyone agrees with my choices!
Cerise was my first recording in Adelaide in 1993 after I returned from living in Melbourne . At the time I thought that all the cool producers were working with female singers so I followed along. I'd recently bought a Fostex 16 track reel to reel, an Alesis 16 track desk, an Atari computer running Cubase and synced the two together with SMPTE code. I found a local Adelaide singer and borrowed a Neumann U87 mike from the festival centre and away we went recording 6 tracks.
Postscript: A friend of mine passed on the recordings to Sony, who still had an office in Unley at the time. They offered us a recording contract but we passed. Maybe that was a mistake, maybe we dodged a bullet. We'll never know. So I sat on it until now. Who would have thought.
So here goes with the tracks, in order.
1 Take it to You - A deep and powerful love song/dance track that starts slow but builds to an almighty climax with an outstanding vocal performance. My favourite part is the breakdown with only keys with a heavy delay beginning the build up again.
2 Speak in Voices - A song calling people to speak with one voice, unite together and speak for what you believe in. It starts with a cool bass line that soon moves to a thunderous chorus. The return of the chorus changes it to an uplifting expression for hope.
3 Lebanese Love Song - This tongue in cheek ditty imagines a young stud making his way down Hindley Street on a Saturday night adventure. It all turns out well with a cool keys riff and the warmest chorus ever.
4 Lay Your Love - This is 16 year old Rob talking about his amorous pursuits and agitated state of mind regarding the fairer sex. It starts hard but changes feel half way through.
5 Be That Way - First this song was about me and then it changed into an ode to my (now deceased) mum. There is another version where I sing and with more harmonic development that I night release but this is the first and best. (Isn't that always the way.) The opening works as an Intro but I use it several times just because its not done to break up a dance track in this way, but what do I know.
6 Bend Me Shape Me - I was obsessed with this song at the time. Maybe it was the cool Intro or maybe it was the wild Chorus but it wasn't until I produced this remix that I fully understood just how out there the chord changes were. My version is more pressing and demanding the the original showing the frustration of being in love with someone that may not love you back.