shijing
The Living Force
So, it's another quiet Friday night here on the forum, and I thought I'd share something I've been meaning to put up for awhile. This is one of a few songs that I wrote a very long time ago, and finally recorded about 12 years ago or so. I wrote the music when I was about 19, but the words a couple years after that. They were inspired by a situation I was in when I was in college, and one of my first girlfriends was graduating with me and had to go back to her home country immediately after. I didn't know if I would ever see her again, and it turns out I didn't. I wrote the words to convey that feeling, during the months when I didn't know what was going to happen after she stepped on the plane.
The second verse has a little bit of a different history. There was a friend that I grew up with in my hometown, went to college with, and then drifted apart from when I moved out of state while she stayed close to our college town and found a job and an apartment, living by herself. She didn't really have any friends left, since they had all moved away when they graduated, and was pretty isolated -- it turns out she was also fighting with her mom during this time and they weren't speaking (her dad had already passed away). I found out long after the fact through the grapevine that she died in her apartment of natural causes (she was a blue baby); nobody noticed for days until her landlord smelled something off coming from inside her apartment. I wasn't able to be at the funeral -- I don't think I even knew about it until it was already over -- but I felt bad for a long time about the way she died and the fact that I hadn't kept in touch. There was an original second verse, but I never liked it and I rewrote it for this friend. It doesn't make complete logical sense in the context of the rest of the song, but it fit in emotionally since it's basically an open-ended goodbye song.
I was going to a Christian college at the time, and I think the influence shows up a bit in some of the word choices. The really funny thing is that there's a reference to a desert, but at the time I was living in Oregon, in one of the rainiest and greenest places on the planet, and had no idea that one day I'd really be living in a desert. Kind of interesting foreshadowing.
The background to the recording itself is that I had been in a band in college, and after we graduated and went our separate ways, we all bought 4-track recorders to do demos on and send to each other, so this was originally intended to be the rough version of a long-distance collaboration. Not being able to play drums myself, I had to lay a click-track down with a metronome; if it were a finished version, I would have done other things like put some distortion on the solo and things like that. It also wouldn't have been me singing (my own voice did the trick for the demo, but our singer was the singer for a reason ;) )
You can download it here in MP3 format:
http://www.mediafire.com/?x6h1nb2dcew1892
Even though it says "3 Confirmation", that's not the title of the song -- never named it -- it's the title the people gave it who I hired to help me transfer it from an analog tape. Don't ask me how they chose it.
Anyway, the original inspirations for this faded into the past long ago, but I still like the song itself. Hope you enjoy :)
Edit: changed from AIFF to MP3 format
The second verse has a little bit of a different history. There was a friend that I grew up with in my hometown, went to college with, and then drifted apart from when I moved out of state while she stayed close to our college town and found a job and an apartment, living by herself. She didn't really have any friends left, since they had all moved away when they graduated, and was pretty isolated -- it turns out she was also fighting with her mom during this time and they weren't speaking (her dad had already passed away). I found out long after the fact through the grapevine that she died in her apartment of natural causes (she was a blue baby); nobody noticed for days until her landlord smelled something off coming from inside her apartment. I wasn't able to be at the funeral -- I don't think I even knew about it until it was already over -- but I felt bad for a long time about the way she died and the fact that I hadn't kept in touch. There was an original second verse, but I never liked it and I rewrote it for this friend. It doesn't make complete logical sense in the context of the rest of the song, but it fit in emotionally since it's basically an open-ended goodbye song.
I was going to a Christian college at the time, and I think the influence shows up a bit in some of the word choices. The really funny thing is that there's a reference to a desert, but at the time I was living in Oregon, in one of the rainiest and greenest places on the planet, and had no idea that one day I'd really be living in a desert. Kind of interesting foreshadowing.
The background to the recording itself is that I had been in a band in college, and after we graduated and went our separate ways, we all bought 4-track recorders to do demos on and send to each other, so this was originally intended to be the rough version of a long-distance collaboration. Not being able to play drums myself, I had to lay a click-track down with a metronome; if it were a finished version, I would have done other things like put some distortion on the solo and things like that. It also wouldn't have been me singing (my own voice did the trick for the demo, but our singer was the singer for a reason ;) )
You can download it here in MP3 format:
http://www.mediafire.com/?x6h1nb2dcew1892
Even though it says "3 Confirmation", that's not the title of the song -- never named it -- it's the title the people gave it who I hired to help me transfer it from an analog tape. Don't ask me how they chose it.
Anyway, the original inspirations for this faded into the past long ago, but I still like the song itself. Hope you enjoy :)
Edit: changed from AIFF to MP3 format
Great song, Shijing! I remember you saying at some point you played bass, but I never knew you were such an accomplished musician. I liked it so much I just listened to it three times!
Unfortunately, it's always the songs that I DONT want stuck in my head that do.
