Original Song and Photos - Paul Hallman - Mountains

Hello fellow Steemians. I haven’t posted an original song since my first post, with Dirty Games. I’m having a blast doing phone recordings of acoustic covers for @luzcypher’s Open Mic Night, and I also have a few studio recordings of covers (I’ve posted one of those so far, at https://steemit.com/music/@paulhallman/like-spinning-plates-paul-hallman-radiohead-cover). But of course recording my songs is the main focus for me. Which is great, since we have @thirstyrecords, @jessamynorchard and the #originalmusic tag she’s started, and now @steemradio supporting songwriters here on Steemit.

Mountains

If Dirty Games was an exercise in cynicism, then Mountains is its naive polar opposite. Which makes sense, since I wrote Dirty Games four or so years ago, and Mountains when I was 18. It’s been recorded a couple of times, first on my 4-track tape recorder with my band right before I left for basic training, and again all by myself right before I got out of the Army (with some really cheesy MIDI drums and a groove that was all over the place). This recording I’m posting here is the first time in 20 years that I’ve gotten this song to sound the way I want it to. With my new studio, I can actually PLAY the drums instead of doing it on my keyboard, and I’m getting ever closer to the polished sound I’m looking for (I’m really stubborn and have decided to learn to master my own recordings rather than send them out for mastering). And the groove for this song has always eluded me. It was never sure what it wanted to be. I would swing it on some instruments and play it straight on others, thinking I could get some kind of unique lazy 16th note swing groove. It never worked. So now it just plain swings, at a very slow tempo. Do you know how hard it is to swing and lock in all the instruments in layers on a 69 bpm song? I didn’t, and if I didn’t always feel like songs are “telling” me what they want to be rather than me making decisions, I would have sped it up or something. There’s a LOT of space between the notes at 69 bpm, which makes it hard to nail down a swing or shuffle groove. I’m not sure nature meant for swing grooves to be that slow. But as I’ve said before, I apparently have a penchant for doing things the hard way. And the song has always been meant to be lazy, spaced-out sounding. The extra slow groove accentuates that. It took longer to record than any of the others I’ve done so far, but I’m happy with it. Finally.

Actual Mountains

This seems like a good opportunity to show some of my photos of mountains from around the U.S. Most were taken with a point-and-shoot while I was in trucker training, but once I got my own truck and was making good money I got a DSLR. Unfortunately being on my own meant I couldn’t sit in the passenger seat and take photos, so my photo production on the road dropped drastically with the DSLR.



Salt Lake, Utah

It’s been a really long time since I’ve been out of the country. I’ve seen some beautiful places, and I look forward to traveling overseas again at some point. But I don’t know how many Americans realize how diverse and beautiful our own scenery and cultures are. I didn’t, or at least I never really gave it much thought, until I had a job that had me in several states a day. There’s so much hate and violence and intolerance going on, but there’s so much to love, and the potential to be as great as we like to think we are. To be American is to be part of a rich tapestry of cultures - many from other countries, and some that are very uniquely American in origin, but none are less American than any other. Driving around the U.S. is like driving through different countries, and there are good people in all of them. Even the Northeast. 😃



Virginia



Pennsylvania



California



Wyoming, calm after several hours of driving through a windstorm



San Francisco



Utah



California

Arizona



Utah