Abubilla Music

Background to Songs: Breathe, KHT

Written by Jimmy

Breathe is the third song from our fourth album, King Henry’s Tears and one of the band favourites.  And it almost didn’t happen…

Lyrics:    This song started with a simple idea – what if the loss of love really took your breath away.  So the lyric that started the song, at 6AM in the morning on the last day of the Autumn Spanish Jam was, ’empty matchbook, candles light your tiny hands, and I could breath with you. Candles turn to waxen pools and breathin’s got harder to do.’    But it seemed so heavy and sort of wimply that I felt the need to give the song to Bob again (Bob shows up again on this album) and Bob needed to protest in the chorus right away that ‘This ain’t no road song.  This ain’t no baby woe is me’.  Which is precisely what it is, but then we all know Bob is just a bastard and seriously unreliable.  More more on Bob, click here.

Musically:    This was last day of the 2010 Autumn Spanish Jam, which always involves a big studio clean up.  Before going forward, it is worth reminding you what a real studio clean up is like:

For trivia buffs, the music for this is the instrumental track for Monkey Space Camp.   But we digress.   It was last day, with a flight at 1730, so departure by 1330 or so, with studio needing to stop by 1030 or so for a big clean up (you can’t always rely on the magic red shoes).   Jimmy finished lyrics and went to Andy at about 0830.  No one was sure we wanted to do another song, but we worked on it and came up with a chorus we both loved.   We decided to at least record it as a demo.  Rob was the only other person up, so Andy and Rob worked out a bass and guitar part.  It is about 0945 now, with others waking and starting to clean up villa.  Andy and Rob did a bunch of aborted takes, but then did one take, live, with vocals, base, guitar down in one.  We all loved it.  But again, felt it was a demo and thought we’d come back in London to re-do with band.  But every time we returned to the track we couldn’t think of anything to add or take away.  It was so intense that we just left it.

Mix: The only change we did take was to cut out a final round of chorus.   We felt the song worked better slightly shorter.  So Andy did a fancy little edit to take out the final repeat of the chorus.  And pretty much that was it. What you hear is the two of them playing the song live, with lots of folks cleaning up the studio around them.

Recommendations: If you like this, you might like a couple of other Andy stripped down vocals.  My favourites are, Fly Me Baby from Andy’s Spiralling Album and  Box of Yellow Roses and One in a Trillion from our second album, Misery Marmalade and Other Spanish Jams.    For some reason, every time I hear the beginning of Breathe, I’m reminded of the pulsing bass and acoustic guitar of Wooden Ships by CSN.  Here you go:

Jimmy