Snowplow must have taken longer than any other song on this album to write. It was so hard. It's basically a collage of all these parts I'd been working on for years that all seemed to kind of be the same aesthetic, especially the drop D ones. It was so unlike anything I'd ever written before, and I'll probably never do anything like it again. Maybe.
The biggest influences for this song were my favorite classical pieces, like Liebestraum and this piece Recuerdos de la Alhambra. That piece in particular I remember, my friend Steve (of "Steve's Stand-up Bass") had this crazy grandpa who was like a collector* and world traveler. When he died we were going through all his stuff and Steve let me have this record of his, "100 Years of Classical Guitar" or something. I went home and put it on and that song came on. I must have been only 18 or 19. I didn't know music like that existed. It was so romantic and dark sounding. Snowplow is my attempt at writing a song like that. The result is a lot simpler and more John Fahey-y. That's also part of the reason I chose to have it on steel-stringed instead of nylon-stringed guitar. It's supposed to be indie.
Like in "Lucy", I sort of ripped off Kalinnikov's Symphony No. 1 in this one, the 2nd movement. It just kept coming up. Specifically it's the D to E9 to Gm that ends the whole form.
The first recording I have of this piece is from September 14th, 2018, and it's called "Salsa Moon" after the original working title of this piece which was just "Moon". It's just the little intro riff, which is where the whole thing started. I thought it sounded so lonely:
After that the next recording isn't til November 7th, 2021. It's barely the same but a lot of the parts are along the same line as the final song:
The next one is from December 20th and outlines the ending in a little more detail:
I literally remember waking up Christmas morning that year and the picking pattern was in my head. That never happens. December 25th, 2021:
Somehow by January 3rd there was a somewhat playable version beginning to take shape. I'm not sure if the work was all completed that week or if it had been done before that point. It also still had the original intro which was yet to be cut but that I do really like:
Here's another demo from a couple weeks later on January 16th. This was also the point that the working title was changed to "Circus" for some reason:
The next 2 years were an endless battle trying to consolidate all the parts and finish the piece. In a way that every note felt deliberate. I can't include all the recordings. Most of them are extremely minor changes or decisions that went back and forth over and over again or got lost. In 2022 alone there were 35 voice memo updates, including one that's 24 minutes long.
A major issue to me was the ending not feeling completely earned. In Liebestraum or Claire de Lune there's such a huge emotional arc developed throughout the piece that earns the coda at the end. But it just felt sentimental here. Obviously I'm not going to say that this piece is as successful as either of those. But adding that third repeat section definitely helped.
Here's one from May 8th, 2022 that became the section after the little A7 thing:
Here are a couple examples of parts that didn't make it in:
By the time it was finished, I had to start the process of actually recording it. The Losing a Friend guitar tone had to be good, but not perfect. This one there was nothing to hide behind. The guitar tone had to be perfect. And getting a good full take of a 10 and a half minute song sucked. I tried the Losing a Friend technique, with 4 mics, but that didn't work. It had to sound like how it sounded in my room, alone at night. Super quiet and rich. I took a bunch of takes, made a new session when that one got too crowded, had to switch to Caleb's computer cause my fans kept turning on every time I tried to record it. I was on like the 3rd Pro Tools session and probably 40th take when I found these 2 random attempts, from I don't know when, hiding somewhere in the Losing a Friend session. And they were perfect. It sounded like a hundred times more natural and open than any of the others had sounded. I tried recreating it but I couldn't. I have no idea what the mic placement was. I must have just done a couple late at night and gone to bed and forgotten about them. The first one of those 2 is the take that ended up on the record.
Choosing a title was also really hard for this one. Here's a list of some alternate titles, roughly in order of choiceness:
Snowplow
I'll Come At Night To You
Firecracker
Lost Gold of the Palo Duro
Box Elder
Jackpot
Bullfrog Canyon
Personnel:
Ibanez Artwood AC240 Guitar
Recorded at 24bit 96khz
Unmastered Version:
