themesongs track 8

"Di Ko Ma-take"

I wrote this around late 2004 or early 2005, a time when i wasn't really part of any band where i took part in the songwriting process. I worte a couple of songs for Narda then -- "Saan Na?" and "Kometa Astrolabe" -- but that's as far as it went. Maybe I wrote this song in the hopes that I would perform it with a band of my own. Some friends have asked me to form bands with them, but none such bands ever materialized -- until ABS, that is. When I joined the shirleyfold after inadvertently laying bass tracks during the Rizal Day Sessions, this song had already written itself. It was just waiting to be jammed and nailed down.

It may seem a bit tangential, but DKM's main riff i ripped from "Sunshine Barato" by The Mosquitos. I had just discovered them that time and was practically drooling over their music which in Timi Potenciano's words sounded like "astrud gilberto and belle&sebastian put together". The main G-Gm riffing stemmed from the fact that the guitar I was using at that time had a broken D-string. Thus, I was stuck to playing power chords on the E & A strings. This proved quite helpful as I was able to experiment with different chordal voicings with just two strings.

I rarely wrote songs about frustration so I thought then that this would be perfect time to start hahaha. The frustration in DKM stemmed from a whole host of stuff. Although I suppose it started with GMA's SONA about the "bangkang papel". However, I didn't want to pin it down on just that. So, I kinda gathered up all my frustrations, sifted through them, and selected choice parts so as to project a feeling of general frustration not particularly directed at anything or anyone.

As for the chorus, I was being challenged that time by former Tungaw-mate Mark Villena (If Owel had a songwiriting soundboard with Ean, Mark was my Ean then as we had been bandmates before in Tungaw) to write a song with what he called a "real chorus". He claimed that I was being "madaya" because the choruses of my past songs weren't really choruses in the strict sense of the word. He said they were more like verses set to different chord progressions. So I put up to his challenge. When I played DKM for him one time we were throwing songs at each other, his resounding comment was "Now that's a chorus!".

Another source of inspiration for DKM is Dong Abay and his knack for the catchy chorus. I had known Dong since our Tungaw days when we first fronted for them at Club Dredd EDSA waaaaaay back February 1994, when Dredd had just reopened. When Dong resurfaced in the music scene in 2005, Mark and I were playing in an early incarnation of dongabay, Dong's comeback band. I guess my playing for Dong also rubbed into my songwriting process.

Recording the song was quite an engaging experince as well. I remember Owel telling me that I was to play all guitar and bass parts since it needed an 80s Violent Femmes kinda feel. So after nailing my bassline, which I ensured was simple enough to let me sing simultaneously, I went on to lay down the guitars using Joey LOA's pearl white Epiphone SG with three pickups, which has a nice warm growling tone. For the guitar solo, it's actually comprised of 2 parts -- the "rhythm" solo (as I'd like to call it) where I played a melody using octaves, and the high-pitched "lead" solo where we slightly detuned the strings as to produce an eerie desifinado (off-key) feel. Then the song was superbly topped with the spooky keyboards which greatly added to DKM's overall quirkiness.

=jing=