Dreams Never Get Finished

Here's my submittal for Spokesmen Cover Song IV: Dreams Never End (original by New Order).

We got together at Bill's place this evening for a listening party, which only halfway materialized. However, the food, beverages, and company more than made up for the dearth of completed covers. Many thanks to Bill and Joanne, Ethne and Sophie for their hospitality!

Doctored photos of the event may be posted at a later date, once we have songs from Brian and Jason.

Anyhow, click the cover art for the download, and read below if you want an entirely uninteresting description of process, etc.



The band name "Freedom Club" derives from the cover picture, which I found linked on a design blog I frequent. So far the only person to correctly identify the (in)famous structure in the picture without prompting is Wes.

This was probably my sixth or seventh attempt at figuring out just what the hell to do to cover the song. If you're familiar with the original, it is almost two songs in one; a super long intro that eventually segues into the main verse/chorus part. Every time I had something in mind for the intro, I would get stumped at how to make the transition and eventually complete the second. There are some real mutants on the computer here, versions with everything played backwards and then reversed, really speedy Unrest-y versions, an intro that sounds like a (hamfisted) outtake from Long Division, and more, which will be seeing the business end of a delete key when I start running out of drive space.

A simple, slow approach ended up working best for this one, and I severely reduced the instrumentation from what I had originally intended. The main thing you hear throughout is easily one of my favorite instruments, and best thrift store scores: the Wurlitzer Electric Piano (Model 200; shown here with the cover off so I could clean it up a bit).



Found this thing at Funky Furnishings when it was still on Broadway for an insanely low price. One of these days I'm going to rig up a sustain pedal out of old hi-hat pieces. It has been on pretty much every piece of vinyl put out by that other band I play with, and when we had to downsize practice spaces, the Wurli came home with me. The electronics are really crackly, and so it took a good deal of judicious editing to get a track that wasn't static laden. You can still hear a few pops in the song that just couldn't be removed.

The bridge and then the balance of the song is a single track of guitar, and there's a bass that plays not one, but TWO notes. The over-reverbed tambourine was supposed to serve as the base for more percussion to come, but I ended up not wanting to busy the song up too much. And that's pretty much all that is one there. Thank god Hooky only sings about 3 notes in this song, so I didn't have to do 12 vocal tracks to mask my deficiency in that department.

OK, this is a boring read.
Off to my beverage!