“Left Off” (Demo)
Wild Card - March ‘21 - Moorhaunter Demo: Left Off
Ahhhhhhh loops. The long-standing love/hate relationship...
It was something I adopted pretty early - I definitely took a looper on my first tour to (promoting Orange Days on Lemon Street the summer of 2008) to help recreate the background vocals on "Could've Had Me." I had recently written "Havana" around that time, and also had a looping arrangement for "Memphis Lee," so I definitely used it for those, too. Probably some others but I don't really remember now.
Most folks that I see loop take a really long time to set up their loops, and then basically play over them for the rest of the song - I was never into that. I really liked the idea of setting up an initial loop to start, and then for the most part building up as I went.
A really basic example, for instance, on the first chorus of "Could've Had Me," I would just sing the lead line live (while "secretly" recording it to the looper), so that when the second chorus came around, I could trigger the loop of the lead, sing the second harmony over it and overdub (loop that) on top of the first one. Then the third time around, I would do the same thing and sing the higher harmony above the first two.
To pursue building looping arrangements in this way presents a lot of interesting challenges (basically project management) about what you can or can't do with the equipment you're using and what its capabilities are, as well as trying to come up with ideas that will be interesting to the listener while they're watching you work.
I definitely used that first looper, a Boss RC-50 quite a bit for a while, but with any gear/hardware, it was "another thing" to carry and have to worry about malfunctioning, so I used it with less frequency after that first tour. It was basically a giant board with 5 or six foot switches that did different things.
Around 2011, I dusted that baby off again and did some more with it once I had gotten a pretty cool residency on Friday nights at this awesome speakeasy-type small space downtown. Since I had the whole night to myself it was a really special period of my life working up arrangements for tunes during the week, followed by the total fear and chaos of trying stuff out on the weekend and starting all over again.
I got pretty crazy with my guitar pedal rig at the time, and was finding tons of limitations with what I could do on my RC-50. I won't bore you with the technical aspects of it, but basically it was a lot to manage between switchers, splitters, and various inputs and outputs on top of just the actual difficulty of looping and coming up with the arrangements in the first place. With loops, once you start, you have very little time to execute, and one little mistake can ruin the whole arrangement. Meanwhile, you're in very low light, singing, probably playing an instrument, listening to a click in your ear that no one else can hear so things line up right, using your feet to trigger certain buttons that do different things in a very particular order.
It burned me out again trying to keep up with the looping, and right about the time the residency experience stopped, Gavin lent me a new gadget: a TCHelicon VoiceLive Touch 2. This was a lot different from the RC-50, since it mounted to a mic stand and was marketed primarily to singers who don't have instruments to play, so you can press different buttons with your hands (you can use an optional footswitch but it will only trigger one thing at a time). The other difference about this gadget was pretty huge - in addition to being a looper, it can optionally add seemingly endless effects of all types to the vocal you're looping (delay, reverb, auto-tune, harmonization, and more).
The operating parameters of this toy were a lot different from my older device (how many loop sequences you could have going at once, how long they could be, how many layers you could add, etc), so after opening the box and wanting to just jump in with rebuilding some of my old arrangements, I quickly realized I'd have to remap all of those. Rather than doing that right then, I wanted to have some freedom to explore what the VLT2 could do from a fresh perspective to help me learn how it worked.
I was in Bob's "song game" at the time, so, of course, I had to write and turn something in that week. Thus, I decided to write this song, "Left Off," specifically for the TCHelicon VoiceLive Touch 2, all hands and vocals, no feet. I did attempt to perform this just a handful of times, incorporating midi-controlled sounds using a LaunchPad connected to Ableton, incorporating them in to the arrangement live. Which was kind of fun to do a mini set all vocals and no guitar.
Around this period was when Maria died, and pretty shortly after I had the idea of making an electronic/rock project that centered around grief songs as sort of a tribute to our live-fast-die-young-rave-days. I initially wanted it to be perhaps a collaborative indie-rock group á la Broken Social Scene, until I remembered that counting on other people usually leads to delays and conflict 😂
At that point, I started formulating a project I was originally calling "Shiver Me Timbres" - which I later renamed "moorhaunter," a term I pulled out of Jack Kerouac's "Big Sur."
Kerouac is describing a friend/acquaintance "McLear" of theirs like this when he makes up this funny term:
"McLear exhibits another strange facet of his handsome but faintly "decadent" Rimbaud- type personality at his summer camp by coming out in the livingroom with a goddamn HAWK on his shoulder -- It's his pet hawk, of all things, the hawk is black as night and sits there on his shoulder pecking nastily at a clunk of hamburg he holds up to it -- In fact the sight of that is so rarely poetic, McLear whose poetry is really like a black hawk, he's always writing about darkness, dark brown, dark bedrooms, moving curtains, chemical fire dark pillows, love in chemical fiery red darkness, and writes all that in beautiful long lines that go across the page irregularly and aptly somehow -- Handsome Hawk McLear, in fact I suddenly yell out 'Now I know your real name! it's M'Lear! M'Lear the Scotch Highland moorhaunter with his hawk about to go mad and tear his white hair in a tempest' -- Or some such silly thing, feeling good again now we've got new wine"
My captivation by the myth of La llorona, my undying love for the novel Wuthering Heights, and all those other similar fascinations convinced me this was an appropriate name for this project. I had been using the term for a while as a sort of online alias for a few years anyway and it just made sense.
Lyrically/emotionally: I was wrestling with a romantic "two roads diverged in a yellow wood..." moment. In retrospect, I made the right decision, but in this song I'm trying to process the choice and am debating whether it was the right one.
Above, you'll find the slightly cleaned-up, higher quality demo version we did at Gavin's studio during the same session as "How Could You?" that I shared with you last month, but attached to this post you can find the original demo I produced myself right after writing it. I think the "newer one" sounds better, but the original one has a really cool feel/vibe to it.
This is probably one of my favorite songs I've ever made, but I've had very few opportunities to perform it. After some truly hilarious and disastrous performances with the VoiceLive Touch 2, I sent the loaner back and bought the floor pedal model, the VoiceLive 3, and used that quite a bit for a while for all kinds of things from Lex Land performances to church gigs.
As always, I realized I couldn't be effective pursuing all these projects at once and had to put it on the back burner, hoping I could dig back into "moorhaunter" another time. When we moved into the tiny house, I really couldn't justify having all that expensive equipment that I didn't see an immediate need/use for, so I sold or gifted allll of my looping stuff and guitar pedals 😭
So, I'm starting from scratch again, and now that I'm streaming on Twitch in particular, I really really really wish I still had my VoiceLive 3. There is a new version, a VoiceLive 3 EXTREME 🤣 that I'd like to try to acquire within the year so that I can not only add some backing vocals, etc to solo Lex Land performances, but I can try to resurrect moorhaunterfrom her shadowy grave...
That being said, I really ought to procure some other higher-priority items first like a better camera and a computer that can handle streaming better than my old machine. Here's a list of stuff I'll be working toward this year to help improve the streams.
As always, thank you for supporting me in my journey to make the art I feel I need to make to share with the world. You’re helping me shine a light in dark places where I feel it might be needed.
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❤️ Lex
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