Chaos Of Life came together very quickly for us. We went from “Let’s do another song before our studio time runs out” on Wednesday night to completing it by the Friday morning. So just over a day.
After dinner on the Wednesday night, we figured we had one full day remaining in the studio. We also had another couple of hours after that (our time ran out lunchtime on the Friday). We figured we’d have a couple of hours to see if we could come up with a riff. A quick and dirty recording meant we could go back to watching Metallica’s Some Kind Of Monster video and go to bed with this idea to develop.
We re-listened to the riff in the morning and decided it’s worth keeping. Plus we kept reminding ourselves of the goal of quickly bringing a song together. We had the framework of a vocal melody and a verse-and-a-half of lyrics. So while the tracks were being recorded in one room, lyrics were being written in another room. I say “another room”, but it was from the dining room to the living room so it’s a technicality. Not knowing exactly how the structure was going to go, about six verses were written with each on a separate page, so the final order could be decided on the fly. And of course each page had a “ye-ah” or “womahn” reference from Metallica’s influence. We ended up using about half the lyric sheets, with no Metallica references recorded (not even for out-takes).
The solo was done in pieces – neither of us are decent lead guitarists. It got to the point where one played the guitar and the other operated the wah pedal. But we bashed it together, and looking back it sounds good. Another difficult part was playing the shakers – four minutes in one take! And no-one laughed or coughed or ruined the take!
Mixed and mastered in a couple of hours, and now you have the song invading your ears. Enjoy!