MUSIC (DEMOS)

LET’S PRETEND
(ODE TO AL GREEN)

Written in 2006 through my BOSS Loop Station Pedal into a CD Burner. The microphone I used walso went through a vocal enhancer…the TC Electronics Helicon Vocal Harmonizer. The funny this is I didn’t know the pedal was ‘active’ towards the end of the recording, and it starts to pick up the lead guitar lines thru the vocal mic. (SM58) The pedal thought it was a voice, and starts doing backup vocals that harmonize with the guitar part! I was so pumped when I heard this accident!

The song is 2:54 long, and the loop pedal only let you do 3 minutes of loops. I started the song with the vocals and recorded the first pass. The pedal INSTANTLY goes back to the start of the song, so I just changed guitar tones on the fly with the TAYLOR T5 I was using and, without an amplifier, played leads a few times through and then put on a bass part by rolling off the treble and
cranking the bass on the guitar knobs.

I, along with everyone else, love Al Green. His greatest hits have been playing at work for 30 years, and I even have a duet with he and Lyle Lovett, which, I know, on paper looks wrong, but they do “Ain’t It Funny (How Time Slips Away) with a who’s-who of Nashville gunslingers for the backing band and it’s the soundtrack you didn’t know you needed for your life. I wrote the music first for this and let it swell in my head for a few days. After putting the first few lines on, I knew this would be a song I could hear Al Green sing. I wanted to send it to him. I never did.

I can pretend he’d have liked it, and that’s cool.