Other The East Village Vampire
I Was There... (The Frankenstein Disco Demo)

Put on your dancing shoes grandma (and stop taking music so seriously)!

“I Was There...” was inspired by a T-shirt I remember seeing an American tourist wearing in Italy back in 2006 that read ‘I Survived Hurricane Katrina’. Whether that was in poor taste or not I don’t know, but I thought there was something in bearing witness to events beyond your control. I took that idea, added a 1984 vibe and out came the song (well, a demo anyway). I actually think the lyrics are pretty cool.

The music came out of bass line that I couldn’t get out of my head for most of 2010. I think I played it all year and tried maybe 10 different styles of music to wrap around it. Ultimately I settled on some kind of Frankenstein, lo-fi trashy disco sound. Why? I have no idea. All I know is that you can't take music so seriously.

As is so often the case, I originally intended this track to be a demo but found that I liked the end result too much. I love lo-fi scratchy recordings. Sure, you can hear sounds saturate, levels change and so on, but in the end I always go for feel not polish. In this case it felt right. I think you will agree that it is a really strange mix. You really have to concentrate to pick up all the sounds.

As usual I tried to layer the guitars. I think there are 4 or possibly 5 guitars dueling at various points which probably adds to the lo-fi murky sound. Also, not being a keyboard player I tried to do my best Stevie Wonder / Ray Charles electric piano workout (approx 2:09). It works as long as you are not really paying close attention. There are also some keyboard horns to add some synthetic cheese to the proceedings.

Oh yeah! I accidentally deleted the count-in for the track. So, you can hear me stumble a little with the funky guitar intro (I had to estimate when the track is going to begin).

Noisy, shambolic and rough sounding. Call me crazy but I like it.

I hope you enjoy.

LYRICS...

I was there when they cut my hair - I was there
I was there when they stripped me bare - I was there
I was there when the cities flared - I was there
I was there when the darkness dared - I was there

I was there, I was there...
I was there
I was there, I was there...
I was there

I was there when the children were scared - I was there
I was there when the world didn't care - I was there
I was there when they broke my bones - I was there
I was there and didn't fare - I was there

I was there, I was there...
I was there
I was there, I was there...
I was there

I Was There... by The East Village Vampire is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.