VEP - Breeze

It's ballad time! Well, maybe not a proper ballad, but a slower song anyway. More in line with Codeine than any soul or power ballad.

This was once again an "oldie" that I picked up and finalized for VEP, having found no outlet for it in previous bands and constellations. The song was made around 95-96, under the name Karen (for a while I made a lot of songs with women's name - an idea sparked by Carolyn by The Wedding Present).

When I presented the song to the band, it turned out that a lot of changes had to be done. Both guitar and bass came to play quite different parts from my demo. Usually I arrange songs with two guitars in mind, in VEP we only had one, so some drastic measures had to be made.

On the verse, I stripped a rather busy guitarline down to its bare essentials. Also, the bass was transformed into something quite minimalist. Then I took out a guitar voice on the refrain that I thought to be very important for the song ("kill your darlings" as they say). And, there was actually a kind of guitar solo after the first refrain, now there is just a new theme that extends into the second verse.

Actually, this "trick" - replacing the guitar from the first verse with something totally different on the second, I had done before, on an equally mellow Fastened Bulbous song. In both cases this was done primarily because I could not decide on which of the lines I liked the better... But I also like it because it brings in a new element to the second round of verse (instead of, say, adding a keyboard), and makes the transition from chorus back to verse again more fluid.

The original demo also had quite different, more elaborate drums. On rehearsals we stuck to that drum pattern, but in recording I realised that it needed to be changed. Ståle, our drummer, it should be added, prefers the previous pattern. However, since it stays in line with the song's minimalist arrangement, I prefer this one. Perhaps one day I will reconstruct a version with the previous pattern.

In the end, though, perhaps partly because of all that was stripped away, I found the song to be missing something. I therefore asked PG Fostad (bassplayer in Fastened Bulbous, but proficient keyboard player too) whether he could come up with some suitable keyboard. And he sure did! In fact, I think his sparse keyboard lines makes the song.