BEAUTIFUL BEASTS AND USELESS DREAMERS
NOTES FROM A BACKYARD, Part 1
We’ll argue about anything. We’re chronic nitpickers and, at times, a bunch of bloody trolls. We can sit in the same room working on the same song, each of us so far inside our own head we barely hear what the others are trying to say. If you want to know how to stay together as a band, the three of us in LILLITH are probably the last people in town you’d ask.
And yet. We’re still here. Together.
We can spend hours in the rehearsal room playing our way through one half-hearted attempt at a melody after another. Then, in the middle of something we’re playing, I feel that little prick beneath my skin. It almost hurts. I start to sing. The words come as I sing them, and somewhere in the middle of a line I glance up. The others have felt it too. Nobody has to ask if the song’s any good.
It’s sheer joy that makes me look up. Even our darkest, most melancholy song can make me so happy I have to look at the others while we play. That’s when we’re a we.
The disagreements usually start a little later, once the melody has settled and all three of us have a pretty firm idea of what the song needs. That’s when we’re easier to recognise. A three-headed troll with one beating heart.
It’s just passion, I promise!
My man got the gin
while I got the blues to make us warm
I see us in those two in Beautiful Dreamers. He’s got the gin, she’s got the blues, and somehow that’s supposed to keep them warm. In the rehearsal room, I can see their point. We’ve got everything we need in there. The world outside can wait a while.
We can spend a whole evening and half the night on a couple of verses and a chorus. Then we walk home at first light feeling like we’ve conquered the world.
Nobody’s heard us. Nobody knows what we’ve been up to. And if anyone asks what we’ve got to show for ourselves since last time, “a couple of verses and a chorus” feels a bit meagre when what I really want to say is that we’ve sorted our lives out.
We haven’t, of course. But I feel strong on the way home.
Beautiful dreamers? Useless dreamers? At that hour, I can live with either.
Can we survive the daylight?
Oh well, no one knows we’re gone
Far away, so long
I do hope someone hears us. Of course I do. On the way home from rehearsal, it’s enough that the three of us have heard the song. Then the day comes when I want someone I’ve never met to hear that same melody. That’s when it gets scary. Letting go of the song and letting it out into the daylight. Preferably without the troll turning to stone on the way.
In the studio, we can keep going for ages yet. We listen back. Stop. Rewind. Ask the others to listen closely, right there.
Frantzen hates changes. I love changing things. Gregorius hears us both out until he’s had enough. I want fingerpicking. “To hell with fingerpicking. It’s time for some distortion,” says Frantzen.
A couple of weeks ago, we were putting the finishing touches on a new song. This time it was a drum fill. Every time we got to it, I felt the song hit the brakes. Frantzen and Gregorius heard a velvety smooth transition. In the middle of all this sits our producer. The song’s about to go off for mastering, and the feedback he’s had from us on those same few seconds is both “brakes” and “velvety smooth transition.”
Last night a message came through from him.
“You’ve been having these same disagreements since the band started, haven’t you?”
Short and sweet. He knows us.
Things used to blow up pretty quickly. We’ve got a little better over the years. I can still hear the brakes, but I do at least try to hear what the other two mean by velvety smooth.
Eventually our producer sends the song off for mastering. Only then do we manage to take those three steps back we could’ve taken a little sooner.
By the time I hear a finished song on its way out of the studio, I’ve sometimes forgotten which detail was so damn important to get right. But I remember exactly where in the melody I looked up.
He’d say we’re the beautiful creatures
that we’ll do whatever we want
Camilla, LILLITH