themesongs track 1

"kagabi nanaginip si morrissey na may nagmamahal sa kanya"

xmaslights was recorded first, around november of 2006, with this coming a close second. we were going for a "rivermaya covers goldenboy" vibe, with the prominent acoustic guitar and heidi's analog yamaha doing the bleeps in the background. i remember being really unhappy about how it sounded in the early mixes, so we replaced some of the acoustic guitars with electric guitar overdubs. another curious thing about the recording is the chorus guitar part, where the harmony riff is actually more prominent, the live version sounds nothing like it and i love that.

my favorite part in the song though (aside from the alarm clock intro, which totally makes this song work) is the solo in the middle, 1:30 or so into the song. the guitar doing the solo is actually just a scratch track, to be replaced by another electric guitar overdub (possibly with one of our stratocasters, this album was very stratty, featuring my green squier strat and joe's maya and pacifica strats) but then during the mixing, me and joey santos (i love you joey!) couldn't find the actual solo take. i remember him shrugging and saying "ok na naman yung scratch a.." hahahaha i love loa. anyway the super thing about the scratch take that i recorded is that i make a mistake on the second pass, but it sounds like a deliberate variation on the guitar line haha. as mark villena would say: "that's a very human element!"

if you listen closely, there's also a new synth part that comes into the solo, that's from marco harder's roland jx3p, i love how it just blankets the whole thing without being totally overpowering. i really love the sine wave square wave saw wave synth sounds and cheapo drum machine loops, so this song is an exercise in those things, hehe. plus! the early days of ang bandang shirley saw songs written specifically for loops, we just used my old casio tonebank keyboard for all percussive purposes hehe.

the words came after the riff, like most of the songs i write. inspired by the smiths' (duh haha) song of the same title, but i was going for more of a hopeful pov. wrote this around 2003, so this is 18 year old owel talking hahaha.

yehey

-owel