Songwriting

I have never been happy with my recording of ‘River Will Carry Me’ (2022). So, yesterday, I edited the vocals and sound engineering and… Voilà!

The problem for me with the 2022 version was that the vocals weren’t expressing what I needed this song to say: ‘the River’ (life) will eventually bring the character in the song (the singer) to find a man that treats her right.

Thus, the first thing I changed was the audio engineering; this edit of the song uses an entirely different EQ of the voice. I wanted the vocals to sound a tad like the old recordings of Billie Holiday that I loved to listen to when I was ten years old (my Jazz phase). It was THAT sound (loads of high HZ that sound tinny to our modern ear) that I wanted to ‘hint’ at.

I then realised that the ‘blurry’ way Billie sang was also something that I wanted to hint at. I wanted that ‘life has treated me bad and I’m fed up with it’ sound. I deliberately sang with as little movement in the mouth as possible to recreate blurry words like Billie.

Ok, the words are not as audible but listeners love to make up their own words anyway. On Triple J radio (Australia), a DJ asked listeners to call in and sing their favourite songs; the majority had made up the lyrics without realising! Notably, many of the lyrics in songs the listeners had morphed were very clear.

Thank you to Taryn Elliot (South Africa) for the video clips which I have mixed together to accompany the song.

Here is the song streamed on SoundCloud for listeners who prefer music without video.