I am writing this post on the 1st of April 2021 and this week we have announced the date of our first portfolio release Losing My Head, set to come out April 9th. This week's Songplistic blog post is going to focus on the process of how and why this song came to be.
Due to our other portfolio project (Sloan and The First Gentlemen's album Axiom) needing an official release cycle, we at Songplistic felt as though we needed a way to show off what we can do a little sooner. This led to the creation of the Songplistic Session Band. This band fulfils several roles: it allows us to show off our production skills, it allows us to display the talents of our session musicians and it also allows us to create our own in-house portfolio pieces that we can then promote. The line-up of the band may vary between releases but in this track we featured Kayla-Megan Burns on vocals, myself (Ross Sloan) on guitar, backing vocals and drum programming and Cameron "Smithy" Smith on bass. The theme of the song is of a feeling of confusion about the state of the world from the perspective of someone who is unsure of how to take it all. It ends on a hopeful note, with the person stating how they will always stay strong regardless of what is thrown their way. I felt that this theme was rather appropriate considering the year everyone has had, as well as the uncertainty that lies ahead. I hope that this song, aside from promote our production, gives people some comfort during these tough times.
The track itself was an old song that I had written years ago for an acoustic EP that was recorded some time ago but never released. I reworked the lyrics, cut some sections down to make it more pleasing to listen to and set out to develop the song. I took the original guitar recordings that I had made for my EP attempt and used them as a base, I thought this was a good place to start as it displays the Songplistic Method to it's fullest extent. If you only have some chords and lyrics, but still want to make a professional quality song then this is what we can do for you. I then set out to program the drums, this was pretty simple, I just kept to drum beats that fit the pace of the acoustic guitars with minimal drum fills as the drums are not suited to heavily feature in a song like this. Once I had the drums down I sent the song to Cameron to create a bassline, he sent me 3 recordings of differing ideas and I compiled those takes into 1 bass track with the best parts of each take. Once this was done it was time to put the lead vocals on. Kayla was more than happy to lend her vocal skills to the track, I laid down a scratch vocal for her with the lyrics and a basic idea for notes and rhythm and we spent a Sunday afternoon recording her vocals. I then programmed some backing vocals to set up the harmonies but later decided that due to the stripped down feeling of the acoustics that this song required real backing vocals, which I then recorded myself. After this I wrote and recorded some guitar solo sections, added a distorted guitar to the ending of the song to provide an exciting finale and after that we had our final recording! (At this point in the process if you had a fully written song you wanted to have us produce you would send this to us and we would handle the rest!)
When it came to mixing and mastering this track I enlisted the help of Axiom collaborators Paul and Steven Warner, who acted as consultants along the way. Their advice has been incredibly crucial to the creation of this track. I will stress to any budding audio producers, you need to gather as many opinions on your work as possible in order to gain perspective on it, especially if you are both mixing and mastering the same song yourself. We at Songplistic are incredibly excited about this new track and the opportunities that the creation of the Songplistic Session Band gives us. We really hope that people enjoy Losing My Head as it is an example of what we can do for any musician out there. From someone with some chords and lyrics to an established musician looking for affordable and professional audio production.
Be sure to check out Losing My Head here: Losing My Head by Songplistic Session Band - DistroKid
Check it out now on all streaming services!
Ross