NOTES:

One of my favorite Vengeance songs (edit: by now, I’ve cooled on this a little and would probably remove it or heavy it up a bit), but maybe it’s just because it was one of the last. Heartfelt lyrics, with some irony I didn’t catch at the time. Contrary to what I had written in the past, this I absolutely wrote to one girl in particular, the opening references the time I met her, the one most of the songs on the album are written about, the hateful ones and the loving ones.

I’m glad I ended on a positive one now. I played all the instruments except drums and the lead solo, which I wrote and Mike played, because he has a great feel. I composed it but he fixed it up and made it more fluent and cool. I spent a good deal of time sweetening this one up with keys and stuff. There is a neat echo thing going on in the break.

Doc Weasel played this song live a few times, but our bass player had a serious mental block on the chord pattern, or else he didn’t like it and was sabotaging it, which is not out of the question, and we gave it up, but fitting that the last song on the last CD is the last song the three remaining members (me, Mike and Chuck) ever played live. At the time I was really high on this song for some reason, its a fine song, but not so much listening back now.

I’m revising some of these liner notes, first written in ’97, right after the band broke up but some years from our first releases, so then some of the stuff, like this album, was fresh in my mind while others were more dim. Now I find I remember it all about equally and have some new insights I didn’t have then. I’m shamelessly mixing the old recollections with the stuff I’m updating, its all my notes so its all valid. I still have ’97 ones, so if there is ever any actual interest, I’ll post the ’97 and the ’08 and you can compare. UPDATE: further updates throughout, not always noted,  in 2023 as I replaced the broken theme.

One of my main differences is that during the time of these sessions, ’96, and when I originally wrote these liner notes, I was still very high on this song and thought it was great. I absolutely meant for it to be a Vengeance song and expected some of the guys to push back because it was in no way, shape or form heavy metal. Now, it seems fine, but the chorus seems really hokey. The bridge is really cool and I like that part, and I enjoy the solo, but the song doesn’t seem like all that.

The production is my typical overblown build-up I reserved for the ballads, a verse with no drums then a big build-up. If I did it now, I’d junk the first verse build-up, it sounds like Only Women Bleed at fast tempo. The ending ride-out is nice, and I remember I had vocal stuff planned I wanted to do with the drum hits, I had programmed them in with the drumm machine on the demo and remember fussing with Chuck to get him to do them.

I had done an incredibly detailed and over-produced demo to this that I would have used if I could have got real drums to synch up to it. I was used to the very strong and regular groove of the drum machine for the bass line, and I sweated him on every beat, making sure they were all spot on. We took an entire session just doing these drums and getting them right.

I think Mike played acoustic for the rough so I could concentrate on listening to the kick through the head phones and make sure the groove was cool, and every single hit was on. This song was a huge project to me and I spent endless time on it, on both versions. Maybe I’m being too hard on it now, but I can remember, and from the existing ’97 notes confirm, how much I thought of this song, and it just doesn’t strike me as all that great now.

I also remember the mix-down was a bitch, there was so much going on. There is a glaring error when the vocals come back in after the bridge.

This was the days before automated mixing boards, or at least I didn’t have one, and I had to make notations on the board itself with removable marker to where the sliders had to go for certain parts of the songs because of using the tracks for several different instruments.

By now I was typically using 4 tracks for drums (kick, snare, right left overhead/toms) 5-6 were electric rhythme, 7-8 were lead guitar and guitar special tracks, 9 was bass, 10-11 acoustic guitar, 12 lead vocals, 13-16 backing vocals. This left nothing for keys or the gong, and keys were throughout the song, so I had to use my typical lead guitar channels for them and put the lead guitar on the backing vocal tracks, since they were no where near the lead I had plenty of time to change stuff.

We always had to a lot of stuff like that. A 24 track would have been great, I would have done 6 or 8 drum tracks and had plenty of room for the other stuff. The 4 backing vocal tracks only tell part of the story though. Mike and I would sing the lowest harmony together 4 times, then bounce it to one channel, and so on until we had 32 parts on all our backing vocals.

Same with the stacked guitars. I’d been doing this sort of thing since I had my 4-track, so I had it down pretty good and rarely messed up other channels. Reading back over the lyrics, much of it could pertain to the band, ‘forget the fights and arguments’ etc. We butted heads many times, over music, girls, drinking, but we stuck it out and put out some great tunes.

The other thing is, from 1980 keg party days until 1996, instead of knocking around from band to band, outside of side projects, through 20-some members coming and going, Vengeance was my main and only band, my Only One. Good song for the last one on the last album.