As I alluded to in my previous post , "Answer" has taken the place of "10 Miles" as our second release. It's more of a piece with Aloud than Ten Miles is, but certainly quite different from it in many ways and I hope it will help flesh out listeners' sense of our sound a bit.
Answer has a somewhat interesting history in that the opening/pre-verse riff (which I just call RIFF in the structure chart below) and verse riffs are quite old, dating back to high school. I developed them contemporaneously, consciously aping the style of Sunny Day Real Estate on the verse riff in particular, and quickly situated them together, with a chorus sandwiched in between. It often takes me weeks, sometimes months, for the pieces of a new song to come together. In this particular instance, however, I never reached satisfaction. I toyed with a few chorus riffs, landing on one that I would hang onto in the back of my head, but never felt good enough about it to bother putting the song forward to any bands I was in at the time.
Flash forward to 2010, when I'm trying to get a band together in the city. I had convened a jam session with two friends (neither of whom would go on to be part of AHAS). After running through Aloud, Scared and Steal as my little showcase of the material I was writing, someone said "what else?" Not having anything really worked out, I pulled out the riffs and gave some vague instructions on how I thought it would be arranged. Thankfully, both musicians either weren't listening or misunderstood my intent. The bass player ended up continuing the chorus riff, a descending bass line, over the verse riff. The drummer played the whole thing in double time (at inception I had imagined the whole thing at the slow, half-time tempo you hear in the chorus and bridge/outro now). This revealed some new things. While I can often be rather incorrigible with my compositions, I was very opening to re-imagining this one a bit given that it had never really come together for me. I still wanted the chorus riff to have a slow plodding feel, so I asked the drummer to try starting out with that and then switching to the double time feel when the verse riff came in. Now things were really shaping up.
We played it through a few more times before I had one of those rare moments where one is able to conjure a riff out of thin air and it works. Since the verse and chorus tentatively had the same bass line (which itself evolved significantly from Pat's tinkering later on), I took the opportunity to dump that very mediocre chorus. I stopped the jam for 5 minutes to contemplate where I thought the verse was actually leading and managed to come up with what is now the chorus riff. I played it over a few times to figure out exactly what I was getting at, and then we ran the song again with the new segment. I also conjured an accompanying melody to go along with it. Initially the section was in straight 4, but after playing it a couple times that way, someone commented that it was boring and I tried to make it interesting by messing with time signatures a bit and adding a little liason at the end of the phrase. The exact timing was refined later on my own, but the foundation was there. I thought it would be interesting to try playing the chorus with a dropped quick beat on the second chord without actually changing the timing of the melody at all. I follow with a dropped long beat during the liaison at the end of the phrase, giving a a mathematically elegant 8 - 7- 8 - 6 count. This effect, while probably not noticeable to many listeners, makes the chorus riff and melody a bit more unpredictable and a bit less Billy Squire (with all due respect to the named).
The bridge section of the song was added later, pulled from my mental compendium of orphan riffs. It adds a little intrigue at a point in the song where I was worried about it becoming cloying in its poppiness. Not unlike Aloud, Answer has a slightly interesting structure in that it doesn't bring the chorus or verse back post-bridge, merely the teaser pre-verse. The format is RIFF-VERSE-CHORUS-RIFF-VERSE-CHORUS-BRIDGE-RIFF. This makes the bridge function more like a "B section" rather than a traditional bridge and gives the song a proggier feel, despite it only clocking in at about 3:30. It's interesting how cutting something out, in this case a conventional return to the verse or chorus after the bridge, actually makes the song feel more expansive/grandiose. It's calls to mind ever so slightly the mini-epics of Field Music, a band I much admire though hadn't yet discovered at the time of writing this particular song. I also like how the song is bookended by what I'm calling the "RIFF," and I tried to lyrically bookend the song too with the first and last lines, which are sung over the aforementioned RIFF.
Enough about that. Lyrics follow:
ANSWER
(intro)
It started off, I guess, fairly well...
(verse)
In the wake of what's become of our lives
It's hard to tell you that I tried
Called away, called away
I guess there's something I'm yet to find
(chorus)
Another answer there beyond the line
A new reaction nothing can outshine
(verse)
Do you remember when I used to talk like
I couldn't leave you if I tried?
No way, no way
Try to remember what it felt like
(chorus)
Another answer there beyond the line
A new reaction nothing can outshine
(bridge)
How far I go you're never far behind
Until I'm broken I won't let it slide
I can't reclaim the pieces that were mine
(outro)
All in all it went fairly well...
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