The evolution of a song

Some songs come about very quickly and can be finished in a couple of hours, others take weeks, months and even years to get right.  My current single 'If I close my eyes I am worried I will fall asleep and not wake up again' is one of those that took a very long time.

It is also a song that changed a lot from its first incarnation, to what you hear now and I thought it would be interesting to share that process with you.

I first started working on 'If I close my eyes...' in the summer of 2012, whilst demoing songs for the follow up to 'Get Amongst It'.  The original demo version was a mellow, bright, floaty, instrumental tune.  I knew I wanted vocals on it so I sent the track over to my friend Piers to add to it.

A few months later Piers returned the track with some amazing lyrics/vocals and an awesome driving guitar line.  These were all recorded over the original instrumental track I had provided.  I then had to do a lot of work to do in order to make this new song sound right.

I spent ages reworking the track and could not for the life of me get it right. So, in the end I completly stripped it back to just the vocals and guitar before building it up again.  I created totally new beats to lay under the guitar and vocals and started to add back some of the original demo elements into it.  I also added a lot of new noises and played around with all kinds of effects and filters.


I have somewhat simplified what I actually did, but believe me it took months and months to make it work.

As a finished song, I totally love it and really feel it has the right balance between the vocals, guitar, beats and colourful noises.

I actually ended up releasing the original version last year as the B-Side to 'Boing' - I renamed it to 'Version One'.  I did this because I really liked how the original demo version sounded in its own right and how different it was from the latest single.

You can here the original here :



And now the new version :


I hope you can hear elements of the original in the new version, but also enjoy them both as individual tracks.
I'd be interested to hear what you think