Into Thy Hands - Song By Song!! #1 Remember Me

Song 1: Remember Me

This started as a home recording of mine, back from 1987.

I worked at a music store in Stratford called The Carpenter Shop. It still exists but is now owned by the evil conglomerate Longe & McWaid, or however you spell that name!! The Carpenter Shop was a strange place to work, but a few of us Awakening dudes worked there in our early years. It was strange because it was run by Christians and had a split store - one side sold religious materials: bibles, bookmarks, glow in the dark crosses.. you know! ; and the other side sold musical instruments, songbooks, and well... glow in the dark crosses! I remember going to work in the morning where we'd have prayer time before opening the store, deluding ourselves into believing that we weren't really in business just to make money, but that there would be some higher calling involved. I knew that if the bottom line wasn't being reached, there would be no early morning prayer time at the store! Anyway, I'm a cynical bastard, so excuse that diatribe!!

Anyway... this needless introduction sets up the fact that as an employee of the store, I could take home products to "learn for the sake of better salesmanship," which really meant, "home recording without having to pay for equipment!!" During the summer of 1987, I got quite familiar with a particular brand of 4 track cassette recorder, and I made numerous recordings on it. Many of these recordings have not been heard (not even by me!) in over 20 years. I hope to dig through my old cassette cases and see what I can dig up.

But I know that the song Remember Me was done at home during that time.

When Reunion signed us and tried to keep steering us in as conventional a Christian manner as possible, they suggested that we put a Psalm to music, so we took the song Remember Me and gave it Biblical lyrics.

I think it's interesting that on an album from an era of such technological enslavement, the first audible sound on the album was that of a finger cymbal being played by a human being (Mike!). The percussion elements on this song were done by Mike and Al Powell. We borrowed a "talking drum" from another client who was recording at the studio, and we used it on this song and on "Don't Wait For Me." Mike and Al played a variety of lower sounding toms with mallets and sticks, and also contributed elements such as wind chimes and bell trees.

After that, it's all keyboards and vocals. I'm not sure there is any guitar on this song. Andy would have been too busy editing my vocals to have time to put a guitar part on!

The vocals were huge work and were inspired by a Canadian singer named Jane Siberry, who still makes music today. Her album "The Walking" was a huge inspiration to me at that point in my life. She would have these seemingly random vocal interjections all over the place. It really sounded like she improvised multiple vocal parts and then ran them all at the same time. She may have had more science involved in it than that, but it surely was a surreal, heavenly sound. This is what I was going for with this song. There were sections that involved actual proper harmony singing, but a lot of it was me improvising parts under and over the foundation.

My one regret about this type of material is the fact that it was so obviously sounding like something Jon Anderson would have done in Yes. I used to get quite annoyed when media people would say that we sounded like Yes. But this was the era of their album "Big Generator" and there's no denying that at least Andy and I were consumed with that album at the time. Even Mike and Al, who were less interested in the progressive rock era of Yes music, were very into this new Yes album. So while I felt somewhat insulted when people would say we were a Yes knock-off band, how can you hear something like Remember Me and NOT hear a Yes influence?!! And really... if I was so uptight about the comparison, why would I have allowed an actual Yes song to be on the album?!!

Looking back, it's clear that I was singing in the Jon Anderson range, and when possible, was quite happy to sing in as sweetly a voice as possible.

One piece of extremely detailed trivia involves the 2nd part of the song, where I sing "Teach Me." The melody here gets referenced ever so slightly during the 2nd verse of Clear Day at the end of the album. It was that level of really impossible to hear self-reference, that made this album so special for me at the time.

Also... on the fade-out of Remember Me, you can hear a keyboard part playing the melody to Clear Day faintly in the distance! It's what Frank Zappa would call "Conceptual Continuity," but it would be another 5 or 6 years before I would discover Zappa. That's another story!

One aspect of my singing style at this time which tends to annoy me in my older age is the way I spit out the endings of syllables. Note the word "Trust" with the huge Te-sound at the end. I wish I hadn't done this, but this album is full of places where I over-pronounced stuff, I'm sure for dramatic effect!!

The main keyboard patch was coming from my recently purchased Yamaha DX7IIFD, which was my only touring keyboard right up until the band ended. It had lots of transient, top-heavy sounds to it. It worked live because it wasn't subtle, but it certainly hasn't held up with age. In my home studio, I have tons of VST plugins that replicate some of the classic 80's keyboards, such as the vast Roland libraries and boutique synths like the Prophet 5 etc. No big surprise that I've avoided pretty much any reference to Yamaha's "FM Synthesis!" I would be quite happy to never hear sounds like that again!!

For this album, the emergence of the Roland D-50 was a huge bonus. It had these lush, gooey sounds, and I used it all over the place on Into Thy Hands. But there were times when I wanted those belly, tinny sounds that only the Yamaha could give me. Thus, the main element of Remember Me comes from that keyboard.

Ian - June 10/09