‘The Breeze’
It’s the 7th! My Single of the Month for May is “The Breeze”, recorded with Skyscape over two millennia.
I wrote this song when I was 17 years old; my friend Chris Hug and I had been debating whether it was possible to write an emotionally resonant song lyric without including any human (or anthropomorphized) characters. I thought this was possible. And maybe it is… I couldn’t do it, though.
My approach involved a Rube Goldberg chain of cause and effect, but in the end the only way to make it worthwhile was to introduce people – to have it all impact human beings. Ironically, “The Breeze” turned out to be my first love song, albeit a really goofy one. It’s also the first song I ever wrote on a guitar, which probably shows in the chord progression and the opening riff.
Skyscape recorded “The Breeze” that summer (1993… ouch!). At the time we didn’t know whether we wanted to be Pavement, They Might Be Giants, The Doors or Dream Theater, so we sounded pretty much like Pavement, They Might Be Giants, The Doors and Dream Theater all playing at once, and not necessarily the same song. “The Breeze” ended up a casualty of our non-approach, crushed under, like, 50 tons of mëtal.
With the 20th anniversary of Skyscape’s first album, Band Of The Week, approaching, a bunch of us got together to reimagine and rework some of the old tunes. “The Breeze” got the most dramatic facelift; almost nothing of the original recording remains. We kept Steve Theater’s hyperkinetic drums in the choruses, and Sean Gould’s ringing chords in verse two, but the rest is new. Alex Dubovoy added a more textural set of acoustic and electric guitars, and Mike Keaney – who had joined the band about a month after we finished Band Of The Week – finally got to record the bassline he had played live so many times in the early ’90s. I put down some piano, B3 and mellotron (the only keyboard on the original was a now-dated synth pad), and Joe Abba made his Skyscape debut with an entire section’s worth of 11/8 percussion.
The biggest change is in the vocal track. Instead of my dorky solo lead, my friend Maryann Fennimore joined me to make the song a dorky duet. (Maryann is on April’s Single of the Month, too; no matter what weird-ass shit I’ve asked her to sing, she’s always been such an awesome sport.) And since no Skyscape song is complete without Dom, we added a triple harmony at the end: Dom, Mike and Alex.
I definitely have a soft spot for “The Breeze”… with its odd time-signatures and chord structure quirks, the track represents a turning point in my understanding of songcraft. It’s nerdy and a little silly, and it reminds me of how little I’ve actually changed since I was 17!
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Don’t forget, the 7th of every month is Single of the Month day here at the Song Foundry. We’re already hard at work mixing next month’s track, which will be brought to you by the initials A.F., R.G., G.M., J.S., and L.B., and the word “kalimba”!