call it love comm

Call It Love
Tom wanted to keep this song musically Spartan during most of the verses in order to create a somewhat eerie
effect. Then, during the musical bridge, a full-on string section makes the tune swell with soaring emotion as the
lyrics dance around the melody . . . dance around the tune.

Call It Love was not originally part of the song list for the Revisions Album. I wrote it during the several months that it
took to cut all of the other ten tracks of the project. One day, while Tom was busily setting up equipment inside the
control room, I started playing a new piece on the Grand Piano that was sitting in the studio. I knew that Tom could
hear me, and, as I had hoped, he came out to the studio and asked about what I was playing. After he heard it, we
both agreed that it would fit in rather nicely with the other pieces on the album . . . but only if someone else played
the piano!

A pianist was brought in several weeks later to lay down the staccato keyboard against a click track. I sang the lead
vocal against only that track. Tom gave a rough mix of my vocal and the keyboard tracks to an arranger. Tom worked
with a couple of arrangers, and nearly all of the sweetening charts for the Revisions Album were done by Bruce
Garnitz. But Call It Love was done by Art Kempel.

Tom had worked at a studio in Boston in 68, and while there worked with several arrangers from Boston's Berklee
School of Music where both Art and Bruce were attending at the time. In the 70s both had made the trip west. Art
was scoring TV shows including "Matlock," "Remington Steele," "Falcon Crest" and "Twilight Zone" and Tom wanted that
sort of dramatic visual sound.

One weekend when I came into the studio for what had become my Saturday/Sunday extracurricular detour from
Middle School Administration, Tom chased everyone out to the studio to set up for the day's rock session, then sat me
down in at the mixing desk, and pushed play on a rough mix. Call It Love began as it always had with the single
hypnotic piano notes and then from those massive speaker a major string section appeared. Some of the students
who knew the track drifted back into the control room and gathered behind me. They too had not heard what had
happened to what had been a bare-bones of a track.

During the school week, while I was busy assigning detention, suspending playground bullies and adolescent pugilists,
counselling their parents, standing yard duty, monitoring bus lines, and fulfilling the myriad other obligations of a
Public School Administrator at a Middle School --- Tom had completed the song. Real strings filled in the empty holes
of the original piano track, then synthesizers added more sounds until the piano could no longer be heard. The
instrumental soared and took us on a journey through time to once again reach a point of near silence as the solitary
piano had never left, but was just forgotten for a time. Hauntingly eerie, other-worldly thunder-claps and spooky
-sounding sound-effects rippled across the control room, and continued throughout the slow, ethereal musical vamp
that fades away little by little until there was silence.

The synthesiser player on the track had come in and was standing on the opposite side of the console. All was quiet
until he said, "Let's rock", and the day's session began.