AHQ in the Studio — Behind the Scenes
I love stories that tell what happened behind the scenes. You know, stuff that most people never find out. The near catastrophes on stage, the story behind the song, how a group got its start, or what happened on that song in the studio.
For instance, on my wildly-popular and much-raved-about cover photo for Purpose, there are no lenses in my glasses. Betcha never picked up on that! But I have an even better story to tell.
AHQ recently sat down together and listened to our new CD, Purpose. One of the more attention-grabbing moments on it is the ending of I’ll Live Again. I had Kon pause the CD while I told the story of how it came to be.
We recorded this project ourselves on my computer, and experimented with several ways of recording. We tried recording a few songs one vocal at a time, and I’ll Live Again was one of them. The guys came in to the studio individually as it fit their schedules, and one night Byran was in and we were cutting his parts. I was running the control board while we worked on the tag of I’ll Live Again, and suddenly a bit of musical inspiration struck.
“By,” I said, “try this.” I demonstrated the vocal lick I wanted him to do, and he laughed surprisedly at the daring genius of my idea.
“Are you sure?” he asked somewhat reservedly. “Is that something we’d want to put on the album?”
I assured him it was something that we wanted to at least try, experiment with. Sometimes you have to step out of your comfort zone, push the line a little, take a risk. You don’t achieve wild success by playing it safe. The greater the risk, the greater the reward.
So I cued up the tag, and By launched in. We recorded several takes, and he was getting the idea. I gave him some pointers and direction as to how I thought we might achieve the best result, and he was taking them to heart.
Once again I hit “record.” By jumped in, pouring his heart and soul passionately into the part, wailing on the high notes, moving the line just right, resolving the chord exactly as I had suggested, getting the cut-off perfect. Containing the emotions welling up inside me, I waited a few seconds, hit “stop,” took off my headphones, and turned to By.
“That’s it,” I said.
I’ve often reflected since then on the subtle understatement those two words had, yet the powerful punch with which they underscored the grand nature of that momentous event.
Sometimes you just know when something huge takes place. Mountains may not have been picked up and tossed into the sea, but it is obvious to you that a watershed moment has occured, things will never be the same. “That’s it.”