I’d almost completely forgotten about “Tearing Linen” when I queued it up for a listen the other day. “Say, that’s not too bad,” I thought. “Just needs a bass line and a little polish.”
That’s the thing. I mentioned in an earlier post that I have numerous pieces of music in process at once. Messy as that sounds, I have a variety of good reasons for that approach.
One of the main ones is that I have hundreds of song idea recordings going back to the late 1980’s. While the vast majority admittedly suck, that still leaves a LARGE pool of goodish ideas that I’m dying to work on. These recordings are often just the seeds of ideas. A good riff, harmony, lyric, bass line, feel, what have you, that take work, intuition, and massaging to form into a whole piece.
Having many to work on at once allows me to stay productive. If I burn out on one piece, I have many others to turn to to keep going. It also allows me to step away from a piece I’ve listened to so often I can no longer hear it clearly.
That was “Tearing Linen.”
Tearing Linen
I wish I could tell you more about the origin of the idea but I really don’t remember. It’s based on open C and, uh, slid up to D. I think that about covers it.
From the sounds of the original recording on my phone, dated October 5th, 2019, I’m guessing I just stumbled across sliding open C up the neck a touch and liked what I heard. Thankfully I nixed the wah-wah pedal when I re-recorded it for this demo.
Then, apparently, I set it aside. According to the note in my DAW file list, I hadn’t touched the song file in two years. I was probably unsure of what to do with the two guitar tracks I’d recorded. That’s a common issue I have. “Well, that’s recorded. Now what?!?”
After two years away from it, however, I heard it with fresh ears and liked what I heard, almost unadorned. In the end, I just added some bass and a little polish, like I said above. And voila.
As to the name, well. I find music evocative of feelings, times, settings, images, actions, and more. Sometime, the reason for the evocation is obvious and clear. At other times, it’s a mystery. Why this is “Tearing Linen” to me, I couldn’t say – but it is.
“Tearing Linen” and my other songs can be found on the CAE bandcamp page.
Concept, samples, bass, and guitar: CAE
