Loves Not Through With You Yet

Loves Not Through... started as a song with a beginning , middle and end but ended up as a loop on the crazy Zvex pedal the Lo-Fi Loop Junky. I had been re watching The Harder They Fall, a 50's film with some less than complimentary portrayals of boxing when the vaguest of lyrics sprang to mind. I worked on it over the next couple of weeks trying to match it to tunes that just wouldn't wear it. Around that time I had an opportunity to buy a Zvex lofi loop junky looper pedal. I say "opportunity" as they are prohibitively expensive but this one was reasonably priced. It's an odd beast- if you want to use it like a Boss looper you'll be hard pressed ! I believe it's analog or analog-ish utilizing a chip from old answering machines. Not surprising then there's no quantize, smart start or overdubbing. However whatever is looped into comes out like some old scratchy 78 record or a warbly cassette recording. I recorded a few demos with just circular riffs into this machine and started to match lyrics to one. The boxing analogy for resilience is a tritely obvious one but I thought i was pretty clever working a sport into a song. Pretty clever that was until I heard "When An Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease" by Roy Harper

I did a first run of the song that evolved into an unsuitable synth pop oddity and had to start from scratch using the loop itself as as the tracks starting point. It was immediately clear that less was more for this track and added gentle chords from my Epiphone Dot Studio 335 copy and lush strings form a Korg SP-80s. The reverbs were from a Zoom MS-80CDR in my Tascam mixers send/return. A swimming feedback howl was recorded with the 335 copy and my favourite amp of all time - a Coron Live 10 mic'd with a Blue Hummingbird and used as you would a synth pad. The track still felt empty and I left it alone for weeks hoping something would come to me. It wasn't until after finding an LP copy one of my favourite film scores , Gabriel Yareds' for Betty Blue, that I dug out my melodica to complete the track.Now maybe its harmonica on that score , maybe its a melodica- I've never been able to get a clear answer on that but to me it sounds more like a melodica. My own melodica is cult classic Hohner Piano 26 model and I've tried to incorporate it many tracks but it's never made the cut. I had doubled or complemented its line with my Korg Poly 800 but these sounded intrusive when paired with it and were dropped. The melodica was mic'd again with the Blue Hummingbird which is ideal for small spaces and the mic itself sounds great.