Thievery Corporation

Arranging 2012 Pt. 1:

Writing songs is a journey and there is always a starting point that comes naturally.  It could be the groove, the chords, the melody, or a catchy phrase, but whatever it is it feels good.  The hardest part of songwriting is filling in the missing pieces that don’t come so naturally, and a takes a lot of intention, focus and tenacity to overcome those obstacles in order to “finish” a song, write it off, and move on.  Once the song is written, it then must be arranged. In the case of 2012 “(quetzlcoatl)”, the song came rather easily in the form of garage band beat and a joke with a friend.  The arrangement however has seen many forms through out my days playing solo in coffee shops to its current arrangement with OCB. And even after recording it on our latest EP Fingerprints, it is still evolving.                     

This audio file in this post is the first working concept of “2012 (Quetzlcoatl)” and secondly a more polished version of my original sketch that you can hear directly after.   I recorded this at my house on garage band with the computer’s built in Microphone around 2009.  (You can hear my dad talking to me in the background while I’m recording.)   There are two ascpects that really drew me to this sketch;  the drowning groove and the odd melody.   I had been joking a lot about the Mayan god “Quetzlcoatl” that year and somewhere in my jesting, I found a very sincere interest in it, (as I tend to do with a lot of things i.e. Cooking Fried Chicken/UFO sightings).  I began crafting an acoustic song that I could sing over this single chord beat I had created and tried to fuse the two together by raising the key in pro tools and adding some new acoustic and electric guitars around it.   Next Monday, I will post two other versions of the song and go into further detail about the evolution of the arrangement. 

Hope all is well!

Daniel Watters