Once Around The Block
Badly Drawn Boy
The Hour Of Bewilderbeast, 2000
This brings to mind a great tip for iTunes users (if you are not already employing it) and that is: start and stop times. If you “Get Info” on a song (may be different on PC) and then click on the “Options” tab you can change the point where a song starts and/or stops. This is heaven-sent for banishing awful skits that artists aren’t nice enough to put on a separate track [for me to skip over in the importing process]. It also comes in handy with sloppy track marker placement, where you get an unpleasant little snippet of noise at the beginning or end of a song (coming from the previous or next song) - like you do with this song. With a little trial ‘n’ error I came up with .202 as the best start time for this track. Don’t wince, I’m beyond wanting to appear cool when it comes to stuff like this(!).
Onto the music. I played this track for WEEKS when I got it. It’s a triumph of production. I has the perfect mix of instruments and sound textures.
check the layers in the first :35 seconds:
0:00 - acoustic guitar in right channel (mostly)
0:05 - 2nd acoustic guitar creaps in
0:08 - add bass and drums
0:13 - first electric (rhymthm) guitar in left channel
0:17 - second electric (lead) guitar, favoring right channel
0:34 - add vocals
(various instruments dropped out and added)
1:36 - check the beatles-esque harmonies!
and the moment i wait for:
2:08 - everything drops out except for the two electric guitars (there’s a lovely subtle crackling coming from the rhythm guitar)
2:26 - it jumps from both electric guitars to both acoustics and vocals with no overlap of instruments whatsoever and it comes off lovely!
I get so caught up in the instruments that I still don’t really know what the song is about but I always catch the line “i’m gonna search hard for your clues.” There something perfect about that line to me.
I also just caught that he ends with “Take a left, a sharp left and another left, meet me on the corner, we’ll start again”…hence “Once Around The Block.” Wow, everytime I post a song I learn something new about it…i love it.
>> songs are available for two weeks [5.2 MB]
