Hollywood Nights
So several weeks ago, my good friend Eric Day, author of the blog Zilwaukee, proposed a songwriting challenge to himself and all the world involving "mindless" pop music. I won't go into too much detail because you can find it all in his original post at Crazytown. After hearing Eric's response to his own challenge, I decided to embrace it myself and write my own "fun/dumb/great" pop song. A few others joined in and we had a little show-and-tell session. My submission is now released before you.
A little about my process: The first thing I recorded were the drums. I figured that of primary importance was a simple groove with not too much variation and that it would force me to build a song that was correspondingly simple around it. I recorded a series of 4 and 8 beat segments and some single hits and edited them all together using Audacity and Logic. After that I banged out a simple 4 chord progression that essentially stays the same for the entirety of the song, keeping Eric's mantra "don't over think it!" foremost in my mind. The bass part is a synthesized Logic instrument, as are the two synth keyboard sounds on the choruses. I recorded a scratch guitar track on my acoustic and sent the rough draft out to my friend Maggie Anderson (of RSO's Living Dead acclaim) and she recorded the vocal track in LA. Once she sent the track back, I re-recorded the guitar parts and some additional vocals (oh, you'll probably think you're hearing Tariq Trotter. Understandable.), did some cleaning up, had the brilliant Dana Gertz whip up some cover art for the single and here it is! The toughest part was coming up with a poppy stage name for Maggie. We finally decided on "Andi Ashly".
So now, released to the public for the first time is Andi Ashly's Hollywood Nights! If you love it, go buy it on iTunes - it's only a buck!
A little about my process: The first thing I recorded were the drums. I figured that of primary importance was a simple groove with not too much variation and that it would force me to build a song that was correspondingly simple around it. I recorded a series of 4 and 8 beat segments and some single hits and edited them all together using Audacity and Logic. After that I banged out a simple 4 chord progression that essentially stays the same for the entirety of the song, keeping Eric's mantra "don't over think it!" foremost in my mind. The bass part is a synthesized Logic instrument, as are the two synth keyboard sounds on the choruses. I recorded a scratch guitar track on my acoustic and sent the rough draft out to my friend Maggie Anderson (of RSO's Living Dead acclaim) and she recorded the vocal track in LA. Once she sent the track back, I re-recorded the guitar parts and some additional vocals (oh, you'll probably think you're hearing Tariq Trotter. Understandable.), did some cleaning up, had the brilliant Dana Gertz whip up some cover art for the single and here it is! The toughest part was coming up with a poppy stage name for Maggie. We finally decided on "Andi Ashly".So now, released to the public for the first time is Andi Ashly's Hollywood Nights! If you love it, go buy it on iTunes - it's only a buck!
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