Writing and recording Borderline Love.
Borderline Love (player below) was the first Deep Salvage song. Dave sent me the lyrics and I remember grabbing The Maton (say it again!) and writing the verses quickly. I had been wanting to do a song in F#, because it's a great key on the electric guitar, so I started there and just continued on. And on. And on. At some point, I wrote to Dave and asked for more lyrics as the song grew to epic proportions. Then, following the Deep Salvage recording method, I recorded a demo with my drum machine, bass, guitars and vocals, sent it to Tim Young in L.A., we worked on the guitar parts over the phone and then Sam put down a bass track and Andy pounded out a great beat (he had the idea for the clapping, which I love) and I had RodDammit (in photo) come into Hyde Street to sing and then, for harmonies, I called Josh Fix and… well, Josh started doing his thing and about half way through the session, he stopped, looked at me, and basically said, "What the hell?" He was reacting to the overwritten nature of the song. At first, I was mad, but I knew in my heart he was right. We stopped the session, and I re-wrote the second half of the song (from the second guitar solo) and re-recorded everything except the lead vocal. Josh, if you're reading this, thank you again for having the smarts and guts to speak up and point out the original song's flaws!
One more quick note on this tune: just before I wrote the music I watched a TED talk by Benjamin Zander titled Music and Passion. His main point is a great one, but what really struck me about his talk was the use of tension in a Chopin piece he plays during the talk. Chopin never resolves the song until the very, very end, so as you listen, you start to crave that resolution. Now, I have always struggled to create enough tension in my songs, I tend to sit pretty close to the tonic, a habit that creates SEVERE BOREDOM for the listener. So, for the end of the chorus of Borderline Love I purposely went to a weird chord (Dbm) every time the chorus comes around until the very last chorus, which resolves to the F#. Huh, just realized, after years of feeling indifferent toward classical music maybe it has more to offer than I care to admit!
Read Dave's take on the lyrics here!