"All Along the Watchtower"

Part to the reason there are so many acoustic song near the end here is because I wanted more songs to play live. In fact I wrote this to play live and didn't originally (bang) plan to record it. Ironic because Hendrix's version of the song is probably the best example anywhere of using the recording studio as an instrument.

And speaking of awkward segues, let's talk about my favorite song ever for a minute*. I love Hendrix's "Watchtower" because on top of everything else it has this unique sort of surrealist atmosphere, which for lack of a better description I'll compare to the "Space Coyote" thing from The Simpsons. You can hear a lot of techniques from that song in my songs-- panning, guitar effects, a lot the vocal styles (both Hendrix's "talky" style and the "ooh" and "aah"s from the intro). Of course, this is the rare "Watchtower" that's mainly a cover of Dylan instead of Hendrix. I actually put in some changes, like the increase in volume between verses, to make it more differenter.

I avoided some of the hurdles of the other acoustic songs by recording the guitar and voice parts separately, and thus insuring there was only one thing that could go wrong on each take. Of course I did a bunch of takes before I figured that out. This song, like some of the other recent ones, is very hard to sing, especially as it goes on (I'm actually getting pretty good at the first verse). Some takes had the last verse as the same as the first, and some had it even louder, but those tended to be more shouting or yelling than screaming (yes these are all different things).

Leftovers:
As with "Hallelujah", I've written several other covers of this song, including one very close to Hendrix but in a slightly different style.

This song is also keyed down, quite aloo actually, from C# to F#, basically by playing the Bm, A, & G chord shapes in a lower tuning. I used the same technique as Reaction of only playing D/G/B strings of the chord (not coincidintally, they have same I-vii-vi progression; this song was "written" slightly before that one).

*Note that the two songs I've listed so far as favorites are both covers--which probably says more about my work than my work itself does.