Matt Bowen's minutes of music, photography, et cetera
It’s a full song! Not just a minute of music, but nearly six minutes of music, with multiple verses and everything.
The lyrics veer surprisingly (if you know me well) close to praise music, but that’s not the intention; they’re inspired by a visionary art installation, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, which is a 180-piece collection of objects made for the second coming by WWII veteran James Hampton. Hampton spent 14 years making the throne room out of old furniture, cardboard, craft paper, and foil; it’s really quite moving — if you’re in DC, go to the American Art museum in Chinatown and give it a look. We wanted to be respectful, so I wrote from what I hope is an empathetic position.
The music was put together in Ableton Live, using Absynth, Battery, and Guitar Rig from Native Instruments’s Komplete 6; AAS’s String Studio; me on guitar and bass; and my regular mystery vocalist. The mix is not perfect, but it’s as close as I’m going to get it any time soon; I figure I’m going to be revisiting several of these later once I have a large collection of songs anyway. I hope people enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed writing it; it has pretty much made my last few weeks to work on it.
I saw these guys with Sharon Jones and the Dapkings at the 9:30 club last night, and they were all excellent.
FITZ & The Tantrums “Breakin’ The CHains Of Love” Live Performance (via chynahblue)
My guest singer has returned to great effect in definitely the most energetic track I’ve done so far. I still have a lot to learn about mixing, particularly with vocals, but I’m not going to pretend I’m unhappy with this track. Having a blizzard on Saturday probably helped, because it gave me an excuse to spend all day working on it.
