Into Thy Hands Song By Song: Song #5 - Again

Song #5: Again

Words: Al Powell, Ian Tanner

Music: Andrew Horrocks, Al Powell, Ian Tanner and Mike Powell

This song brings one sharp memory to mind, and I'm afraid, it's yet another disappointing factor about this album!!! (Sorry to those of you who accepted the album as it was. We appreciate that fact, but with age in our case, comes the desire to set records straight!!)

Mike Powell had made a comment on one of these recent blog postings, and it nailed an essential error we made in making this album - that being, the fact that the drums were recorded in MONO! Why this was done is not clear to me, although I have my guesses.

As mentioned previously, the drums were initially recorded via Midi drum pads, so that various tweaks could be made to timing errors and dynamics and such. After this long process, Mike brought in his newly acquired Ludwig drumset and began recording real drums over top of the Midi-performed drums. You'd think with going to such hassle to get some sense of real drums on the album that we'd put them in their proper place in the mix - ie. full stereo. But we didn't do this. I can only assume the reason this was not possible was because of the fact that we only had 24 tracks to make available to everything else, and obviously the powers that be felt that nobody would really care too much whether tom fills went from side to side or not. I hope that's not really the case. I'd like to think this was just a massive blunder that was too late to fix, but I honestly don't remember how this came to be.

But the evidence of this screw up is no clearer than on this song, especially at the end, when the tom fills go all over the kit, but sit static, right there in the centre channel!

Aside from that, this was to be one of our most popular songs at live concerts, and was quite often our final tune of the night. Again, those trademark WHOAS helped sell the song to first-time listeners!!

This song was probably written around the same time that most of the others were written, in mid 1987. It obviously started with the initial contribution of Andy's, and then everybody started contributing. I wrote the melody, but Al wrote a good chunk of the lyrics.

I remember doing this song after the album was finished at a big Christian music festival in Canada. We jokingly referred to this as "Blowfest" because it was insanely windy during our day of performance. It was so bad, that we had to have some of our close friends stay on stage holding down Mike's drum kit so that it wouldn't blow off the riser!! I have fond memories of closing the show with this song, and looking back at our friends Harold and Dwayne holding down Mike's kit. Despite being deafened by the close-proximity to Mike's kit, they were singing those WHOAS with reckless abandon! Hopefully they have not suffered any long-term hearing damage as a result!!

Anyway... back to the production!

This was essentially a pretty simple song to produce. The only moment of complexity came during the bridge, just before the solo. Cedartree Studio had suggested we hire a cellist from Toronto named Dick Armin. He had played on the Unforgettable Fire album by U2, so that gave him great credibility! So we scored out a very simple chart for him and had him play on 2 songs. This experience taught me a little something about using "legitimate" musicians on a rock album. The chart was not professional, but I'm pretty sure it was accurate. Dick had trouble playing the simple line in tune with the other instruments. I found this very bizarre. I was in the control room saying, "can't this guy tell he's out of tune??"

So considering how easy the part was for someone of his level, it actually took longer than expected to nail this part. It was a valuable lesson for me, which I would re-experience years later when hiring educated musicians to play music out of their comfort zones. I don't mean to be disrespectful of Mr. Armin. Perhaps he was getting paid an embarrassingly low fee for his work.

The ending of this song was a mistake I wish we could take back. The song had no official ending, although at our pre-album concerts, the song always had a "stadium rock freak out" at the end!! Perhaps we considered that the song should just fade out, but for whatever reasons, we decided the song needed a legit ending where none was ever recorded. Rick Hutt began the task of inventing a free-form sounding ending based on some big Rock fills by Mike. He found some snippets of Mike warming up on his kit and began editing them into some kind of ending. The idea might not have sounded so disconnected from the song had the toms not all been in MONO!!!

When I look back at this album, even before I began re-mastering it so that it sounded good (!), I always look at side 1 as being a bit of a mix-up. Side 2 was always the one that I held up as being some kind of high art, but the first side always seem to pale by comparison. The odd thing is though, some of those first side songs were the ones we played live for the longest time. I think it's just taking the side as a whole where you see some of the cracks in our production.

You'll probably notice that when I start to write blogs about the second half of the album, that I'll be noticeably less negative about the end result.

Thanks for reading and, of course, for listening.

Ian - June 15/09