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Commentary |
Mr Wrighter's Writing While passion ebbs and flows, true friendship endures. Mr Wrighter, trapped in a passionless marriage, spends his time writing love songs for a friend… much to his long suffering wife's dismay. She is aware of his exploits --- aware that she is not the source of the fire that burns within him … but what is she to do? As for Mr Wrighter, he writes them and recites them. He makes love to the words, but his love is unreciprocated, for there is very little love in print (that is to say of substance or material). The double entendres in the lyrics stand as a symbol of the ambiguities of the conflict… and indeed in even successful relationships. Tom borrowed a large harpsichord from the UC Santa Barbara music department. They just let us load it into Tom's mother's station wagon and drive off with it. That wouldn't happen now.....a laptop full of samples would be the norm. But then samples don't sound like the real thing do they? The sliding tone at the beginning of each verse was Tom sweeping upward a tone generator that was at Two:Dot for testing audio equipment. Mr Wrighter uses some unusual chord patterns that convey despair on the road to madness. To underscore this, we used an old consumer Werlitzer organ that the studio had. It was never quite in tune, but worked well on this song becoming a feature at the end ---- growing louder and louder, sounding more and more like it was being played by a man gone mad. Charles played it, and, on one of the takes, drifted into the first couple of bars of God Rest Ye Marry Gentleman (let nothing you dismay). But of course Mr Wrighter did dismay. We left it in. John Hall provided the creepy laughter at the end. When Mr Wrighter was mixed, we tried a fade out but it didn't seem to work. Tom tried a fade up to distortion level that suddenly stopped in a void of silence. That seemed to work. People would say, "What happened there?" We would respond, "We got your attention". Raymond at RD Records asked if we had the rest of the song tucked away somewhere. We told him there was no rest of the song. |