Tag : #paulkitchen

The Making of Fighting Gravity

After I finished the album And We Dream in 1993, I worked on an album to be called Fighting Gravity over the next 6 years or so. At some point, I abandoned it and began to focus on the tracks that would become A Matter of Time in 1999/2000 – which was also my first album recorded on a digital audio workstation (DAW).  Some of those early DAW tracks were also meant for Fighting Gravity. During this time I was transitioning away from reel-to-reel 8 track half inch tape with SMPTE time code, to an in the box solution. At the time it was Emagic Logic Audio on the PC, which I had first started using on the Mac.  At some point Apple bought Emagic, decided to stop developing the Windows version, and threw us PC users overboard. Have I used an Apple product since?  Nope.

I’ve been dabbling with some of the tracks on Fighting Gravity since 2012. After digitally transferring the 8 track tapes, I sooner or later learned the process of what I call ‘Retreading’ tracks – bringing them into Cubase and remixing, editing, and adding to them etc.  In the past few years, I also figured out how to import the tracks which were recorded in Logic Audio and exported as Midi and OMF files.  FYI, 2020’s Potshots From Over The Hill is a retread album.  And now so is Fighting Gravity: where you might have a vocal from 2022 and 1998 on the same song. Same goes for the guitars, keys, drums etc.

I also decided to remove a couple tracks that have been released in recent years in one version or another like Crying and One Heartbeat at a Time, instead adding a couple tunes from the same time frame that weren’t initially intended for Fighting Gravity, like This is the Night and One of a Kind – both of which were just bare boned sketches with no lyrics per se.  Once I had 10 tracks, I finally got serious in the last couple years to finish my much-delayed album.

It needs to be said that I think And We Dream was a high point for me – I was in my prime 30 years ago (35 years old then vs. 65 years old now).  So to me, for all intents and purposes, Fighting Gravity is the follow up to And We Dream – 30 years later.  I think it’s a strong album, and nothing like a new album I’d record from scratch today. I hope you enjoy it.

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