As I mentioned in my last blog posting, we spent a good chunk of 1987 writing new material to get Reunion behind doing a 2nd album. In essence, this would have really been our FIRST full album under the Reunion name, since they pretty much got our indie album handed to them.
Our original material leading up to our first album, was much more individually written. It was not out of the question for Andy or I to show up with a song written-out on paper, where in some ways, we were using Mike and Al as side-men in their own band. It's not to say that there wasn't some degree of collaboration going on, but more often than not, if somebody wrote a song, you'd pretty much play it the way they wanted it done. (Mike had recorded his own demo of the song Fireside before the band had ever tried playing it.)
But in 1987, we wanted to change the writing dynamic of the band. Playing more live shows helped toughen up our sound, but it also helped the four of us grow closer as friends and with that, a desire to give everybody an equal stake in the writing became a focus.
By the end of the year, we had over 20 songs recorded from a combination of home recordings and live recordings. Many of these 20 songs were written in an entirely different way than before. Here's an example of how we wrote a few of the songs that ended up on the Into Thy Hands album.
The Writing Process
Here's a little explanation about how the song "Wrestling In The Jungle" came to be.
We would have practiced at The Prac Shack, and Andy would have shown up to rehearsal with a few riffs prepared... for example, the open guitar riff. He had that and the next section written, and that was it. No melody, no lyrics, no ideas for how Mike, Al or I should play. We learned these two sections and then began to jam and create stuff as a band. Al wrote the melodic bass line that went with the opening chord sequence (in 4/4, 4/4, and 6/4 time). Mike came up with the roving, jungle beat, which probably inspired me to write the title Wrestling In the Jungle.
I would have written the melody and the words in this case, but that wasn't always the way it was done.
The form of the song, (ie. verses, choruses, pre-choruses, bridges, solos etc.) was decided on as a band, and after a few rehearsal nights, we had a finished song on our hands, written with total collaboration between all 4 members of the band.
This became the new template for writing in 1987 and continued right until the end of the band. Songs off Into Thy Hands that had that collaborative spirit were: "Again," "Into Thy Hands," "Never Say Goodbye" and probably a few others.
There was also time spent during this year where Mike and I got together to write and record 4-track demos of new songs. Two of our songs ended up on the album, "Knife of Life" and "Where Is Love?" Without any hesitation, "Knife of Life" is one of my favorite Awakening songs. It was positively deranged and a great piece of work on the album. Mike would have written the words to it for sure, but I probably helped out on that.
We also had left-over songs from our initial days that still had some life in them, such as "Regicide" a song Mike wrote the words for, and I think I wrote the basic musical ideas. It was very much a song like "Synchronicity" by The Police. It was very intense, fast, and hard to sing. It didn't make the cut for the album though, and was never formally recorded.
Another reject from this era DID eventually go onto have some kind of local-area fame and notoriety. That was "Nightmare On Dundas Street!"
I wrote the bulk of this song, for some insane reason, to be about the murder of John Lennon. It walked a thin line between being a very serious death-metal kind of song and being a joke, all at the same time. We loved playing it because it was so dark and morbid, and helped with the toughening sound we were establishing in our live shows.
This song never would have made it onto the Into Thy Hands album because the album was far too serious an artistic statement to have had something this far out on it. The problem was, it had become a concert success, and it actually became annoying to me down the road, that we'd be doing a show somewhere, and groups of people would start chanting "NIGHTMARE, NIGHTMARE, NIGHTMARE!!" from the audience!
So along with the rejects, came some songs that I had done on my own as home demos, which ended up on the album. "Remember Me" was something I did during the summer of 87' while playing around on a 4 track cassette recorder. A number of songs were written and recorded that summer that have never been heard. Remember Me was probably never played live, but seemed to make a good opening statement for the album.
"Thoughtful" was something I wrote on guitar during this same time period. Andy had this beautiful, old Fender Strat from the 60's that he was borrowing from a friend. I took it out one day while we were sound checking, and I sat outside playing it. While doing this, I stumbled upon the chord sequence from Thoughtful. It was a little hard to explain to the guys, and certainly to Andy. My relatively un-schooled approach to guitar made me very curious about how a normal chord in its proper position might sound if I played it somewhere else on the neck. This whole song was an example of how you could play variations on an E chord in various positions on the neck and end up with rich, complex chord voicings.
One song that got a major over-haul near the end of the year was called "Wait For The Lord." It was actually the first Christian song I had ever written, back when I was in high school. When Andy and I first got together to write, I played him this song, and we actually made a demo recording of it. It was a very conservative song and featured Fender Rhodes piano on it. It was anything but edgy, and the lyrics were as straight and narrow as anything we'd ever written. We played it live in the very earliest days of the band, but the song eventually got cut when better material became available.
After Reunion Records had had a chance to listen to our 20 song demo, they felt the one thing missing was a noticeable single, especially for the AC market, which was where all the money was. Our aggressive songs would do well at Rock Radio, but Rock radio didn't sell albums or bring in any real royalty money. It was cheesy, adult-friendly pop music that raked in the coin. When Reunion voiced this concern, it may have been my idea (or someone else's) to re-visit our most non-threatening song from our past catalogue.
We sent Reunion our old demo of "Wait For The Lord" as well as a home recording I had done that summer of me doing a Yes song called "Onward" to give them an idea of what we could potentially write for the new album. I don't think we seriously wanted to actually use Wait for The Lord, and I know for sure that we had no intentions of putting a Yes song on our album... but when Reunion heard this stuff, they got pretty enthusiastic about the ideas.
In the end, we totally re-wrote Wait For The Lord, and made it a more acoustic song. All the words were re-written, and in fact, most of the words were written by committee. Everybody had something to contribute to those words. Rick Hutt, our producer was co-writing, all the guys in the band were co-writing, our A&R guy was co-writing, and even our lighting tech and buddy Ted Acorn was contributing ideas. This song went on to become "Lonely Place."
Reunion also loved the idea of us re-making the song Onward. As it turned out, during the fall of 1987, Andy and Ted Acorn got to meet the band Yes when they played in Toronto that year (for the Big Generator tour). Andy spoke to Chris Squire, who had written Onward for the Tormato album in the late 70's, and told him we wanted to record the song for our upcoming Christian album. Chris was ok with us using his song, but he was specific with Andy that we make sure we get the vocals right on the second verse, when, on the original recording, Chris sang the lead vocal and Jon Anderson sung the higher harmony. I'm not sure we ended up following his advice, but we did manage to get a nice recording of his song on our album in 1988!
So with that catalogue of songs in our hands, Reunion gave us a budget and a time-line with which we could record our first album for them in 1988. It was more money than we'd ever seen before, but relatively speaking, it wasn't that much. Bigger Christian artists were most certainly doing albums that cost more than $30,000, but with us and Rick Hutt producing and controlling the recording, it would be a good enough amount, or so we thought at first!!
A good chunk of this money was used to upgrade the facilities at Cedartree Recording Studio. They got a brand new 24 track tape machine, so we knew already that this new album would have a much broader scope than our previous recordings had. We had a start time of January 1988, with a deadline of March/April 88'.
There was a lot going on during this time period, and unfortunately, this was bad timing for the band to have a bit of an implosion, but it all happened towards the very end of 1987. I won't go into the details, because I'm sure the guys wouldn't want old dirty laundry up on the net for all to see, but suffice it to say, a personal event took place right around Christmas that almost broke up the band. Our first days at Cedartree Studio in January of 1988 were spent with us locked in a room deciding whether the band should even stay together or not. It was a very awkward time, and there were a great number of very tense moments, where you didn't know whether one or two members of the band would even consider to be in the same place together.
It took weeks for the smoke to clear and for wounds to heal, but amidst all of this, we still had an album to record. It made some of our pre-production sessions pretty awful.
In fact, the song "Don't Wait For Me," (originally called "The First Step") had to be tweaked and re-written without one member of the band being there. It was Rick Hutt in the studio helping us re-write this song with this one member absent. This felt like our Let It Be album!
Eventually, we were able to get down to work without all the personal baggage entering the equation, but undoubtedly, the making of Into Thy Hands would be one of the most draining, emotional, and creative moments of our lives.
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