Hello all.
For those of you who don’t know what Zeebu is, it’s a youth retreat that features three days of very little sleep, a lot of yelling, dances that feature me screaming the pretender as loud as humanly possible, sugar, and discussions of a theme. (For those of you who ARE from Zeebu, you are in the right place) The theme for this retreat was centered around bullying and acceptance, and during the first “theme time” we had a slideshow on the topic. Instead of just pulling a song out of someones music library and attaching it to the slideshow, Troy Rayner and I decided to record something to use instead.
We settled on Innocent by Our Lady Peace, took over a meeting room in the church as our record studio, and between 5:15 and 7:00 (ish) we layed down all of our tracks, and got as many other people from the retreat to sing with us on the last chorus as we could. After everyone heard it we had a lot of people ask us if they could have a copy, so I decided I would put it up for free right here.
The file is on the Music page right below Aqueous, (click the “music” link at the top) where you can listen, or download it free. Right click the link that says download, and then click “Save Target As” to download it.
The first 2/3 of the song is Troy and I, with our acoustic guitars. We did the vocals with one earphone each, together (meaning if one of us screwed up, it wrecked it for us both.
) and I think the harmonies ended up way tighter this way cause we could adjust to each other on the spot. It felt more like making music than just recording a take, it was a way more natural recording process, which seemed to fit with what we were going for with this. (I mean, we only had 2 hours, it’s not like we had time for polish)
The best part of the song, however, is that during the last chorus, there are over 30 voices. Troy and I are in there again once on our regular parts, and once on other harmonies (He’s the guy wailing on the “One Day…” part. Killer eh?) and after our 2 parts each were in, we just brought down friends 2 at a time, to sing the last chorus. When it was all finished we had about 15 pairs of people come down to sing on the track, some loud, some quiet, some high, some low, some harmonizing and some nervous just to see the mic, and when it all mixes together, it sounds like exactly what it is. A whole lot of people, with different voices, singing the exact same song.
Hope you like it, whether or not you were at the retreat from which it came.
Joel


