The Lost Album

The Awakening - The Lost Album (January 1989)

"The Lost Album" only got that name after The Awakening broke up. It was never intended to be an album. They were writing demos to get Reunion re-energized to work with us in 1989 and to cough up some money so we could do a new album.

Like I said earlier, it proved to be the only time in our history where we performed together in one room, live off the floor. Mike had purchased an expensive Ludwig drum kit before Into Thy Hands was recorded, but then had to wait almost a year to record them properly.

We had 10 songs, some of which were left-overs from before Into Thy Hands. We were very rehearsed and ready to lay down these new tracks at Cedartree Studio. From start to finish, this project was done in less than a month. Not bad, considering Into Thy Hands took 6 months!

The plan was to record all of the core tracks live: drums, bass, guitars and keyboards. The only overdubbing would be for vocals and solos. This was a radical departure for the band, as our entire recorded catalogue is one big overdub after the next!! We set up where we could all see each other in the studio. We were in a basic semi-circle with me in the centre of the room, Mike and Al on my left and Andy on my right. Our live sound engineer Mike Holst assisted in the recording, as did our manager Glenn Koehler.

Rather than spend the big money for 2 inch recording tape (over $400 a reel), we decided to re-use old tapes from the studio vault, and we also recorded at 15ips instead of 30ips. "ips" means inches per second. At 30 inches per second, you get more tape mass per second, and thus better fidelity. 15ips saves tape, but costs you in fidelity. Again, these were just demos and it didn't matter.

This blog posting will give you a small idea of what we did for the demos that became known as The Lost Album. Since virtually nobody has heard these songs, there's no point in going into great detail. At some point, it would be wonderful to officially release these recordings, but for now, here is a broad-points description.

Where Would I Be?

This was a song by Al Powell, which dated back to the early days of The Awakening. We had considered it for Into Thy Hands, but let it slide. It's an energetic rock tune that really showed how exciting The Awakening could sound when we all turned up loud and kicked ass. And on a positive note, because the manner with which we recorded these demos involved little or no keyboard overdubs, there aren't as many annoying keyboard parts on any of these songs. I had a D-50 and my DX7IIFD for the recordings, so if I couldn't play it live with the guys, it didn't get recorded at all. This meant there was more room for guitar parts and bigger, more bombastic drum fills.

November:

This was a lyric by Mike Powell. He wrote the melody too, but the core of the song was written by the whole band. This was a great song, and even after The Awakening broke up, this song got performed live. It contains lyrical cues which first showed up on the song Fireside!

Someone Watching Over Me

This is NOT the Gershwin tune!! This is a lyric of mine that was about my brief and meaningless drug period as a high school student. I never did any hard drugs, so this was a pretty silly song to write, but at the time I thought it was noteworthy. Musically, everybody contributed, and it's pretty cool because the verses are in 5/4 time. Everybody gets to shine on this song, and it was a lot of fun to play live.

Walking The Halls

This was one of my favorite songs we ever did. Andy wrote the words, and it was another multi-part song, sort of like Never Say Goodbye. It started out as a folky ballad, but then goes into a Cajun section, a Prog section and then returns to the laid-back folky sound for the end. We tried playing this song live, but we were never very good at it.

Amazonia

This is the one song on The Lost Album I would reject in a heartbeat. It was a song of mine from the early days of The Awakening. Back then, it was called Escape, and it was some twisted thing about torture ("escape a burning rope, escape a burning sore." Yeah, I don't get it either!)

In very early 1989, the issue of the Amazonian Rainforest devastation was just becoming big news, so I decided to re-write this song and make it about environmentalism. It's dramatic and well played, but it was pretty over the top. The middle section has the sounds of crying babies, "our children choking in the flames." Nice stuff!

Drawing Closer

This song almost made it onto Into Thy Hands, but we decided to re-write it. The re-write was great. The lyrics were much better and it just kicked serious butt. It was a great song live. This was one of the few songs we did where I basically just sang without playing keys, so it gave lots of room to Andy to play some serious Rock!

Hearts In Iceland

This song was originally called "Too Many Chords and Not Enough Lunch!" That title says it all. It really had too many chords and not enough meat in it. Al wrote the original lyrics, and I recall this was one of those awkward times where Andy took issue with the words and caused some hurt feelings and stress as we tried to fix it. Al was not as experienced a lyricist as the rest of us, but he had really good ideas that just needed a little work to be considered finished. God knows my lyrics at the time needed some editing!

But this song was a bit of a problem song. Musically, the chords were all over the place, and a solid melody didn't come jumping out as a result. So when Al took it under his belt to write the words, he didn't have a good sense of how these words would sound when sung over the many chord changes of the song. It led to us having to scrap a lot of Al's original lyric, and I think that really took the life out of him and made him less willing to contribute in the future.

When we re-wrote it, we kept some of his original ideas (and certainly his chorus and title), but with a new melody came new phrasing and new lyrics for the verses.

After The Awakening broke up, Andy and I continued to re-work this song, and actually recorded it for our first independent album of the 1990's, our "Counting By Heads" album of 1992.

Chains

This was a song of Andy's that got re-written over and over again well beyond The Awakening. In its original condition on these recordings, the song basically works best. It was another 4 part song, where there was no noticeable chorus. Every new section seemed like it might be the chorus, but then another one would start up afterwards throwing the listener off. Andy and I were still working on this song as late as 1992 before we finally let it go.

Seven Sails

Seven Sails is possibly the best thing The Awakening ever did together, and of course, few people have ever heard it! This was a remarkable collaboration between the 4 of us. Andy started the song, and it just took off from there. The drum part was outrageously hard to play, and vocally, it was exhausting to sing. Mike wrote the words, and it became a very important song for us live. It was progressive, but stayed within the realm of late 80's rock rather than the excesses of the 70's.

Marble Orchard

This was a stellar and extremely dark song by the whole band. Mike wrote the words and the title, and the rest of us put our ideas into the mix. It is possibly the heaviest song we ever recorded, and lyrically, it was very, very dark. "Roses lay upon this grave. The soul is gone but the corpse remains." and how about this> "in shadows view the hearts intent, to hide this life is death from deep within."

Since most people on Earth have never heard this, it doesn't make much sense to discuss the insane ending of this recording, but I'll say it simply: We had fun in the studio with this one. Even though the song is dark, dark, dark... the ending is simply insane. It's possible that I did the ending, but Andy had no intention of actually releasing it this way! You hear the sound of me feeding a bunch of pigs shards of broken glass!! Yeah... I don't get it either, but it must have made sense at the time!!

Thus ends the 10 songs formerly known as "The Lost Album."

Now, for some updated info:

For those of you who didn't know... after The Awakening broke up, Andy and I continued to write and record together, and by the early 90's, we were on the verge of having a whole new band to play with. A variety of musicians and songs came and went before we recorded a new album together. This is where the story gets confusing!

We did an album called "Counting By Heads" in 1992. Our band was AT THAT TIME called "The Obvious," and this was a totally independent album.

In 1995, we signed a deal with another lousy US Christian label called "Liquid Disc Records" (or as I later dubbed them: Liquidation Discs!). We had to change the name of our band because there was another band already recording under the name The Obvious, so we then became known as "One Hundred Days." This was just Andy and I and our drummer Gord Stevenson.

We released an album in 1995 called "The Obvious." yeah!! confusing!!

Liquid Disc needed another release for its catalogue in early 1996, and so it was decided that we could re-package our "Counting By Heads" album and sell it as sort of a reissue of the past. In doing so, and because Liquid Disc was fully immersed in the US Christian Pop market, we thought it might be interesting to put 3 songs from The Awakening Lost Album on it. We got the consent of Mike and Al, and released "Where Would I Be," "November" and "Seven Sails" on this new album. This is the only official place where anything from The Lost Album ever got released.

There - long story short!!

Thanks for reading.

Ian - June 21/09