Behind the Music with Miranda Faul

I started writing Summer on a sunny evening this June, and it was a labour of love to finish writing, arranging, recording, and producing it in time for a late-Summer release. That evening, I sat in my kitchen with the door open, looking out to my sunny garden, and started picking out a new guitar melody. From here, some vocal melodies came to me in response to the guitar. I was at first intending to write a melancholic song as I’d been processing some difficult emotions. The song thus opens with lines about pain and tentative healing; ‘Warm air and blonde hair that was dark two months ago/ Slow thawing of a heart that’s been reeling from the snow’. However, the Summery evening influenced me, and it became a song about love and Summer. I’m glad that it began this way, as the song has a lingering sense of melancholy, which tempers the romance; I’m not much of a romantic.

I would say that the guitar and vocal melodies influenced each other as I wrote. I played over what I’d written again and again, tightening the structure. By the end of that evening, I had written the first two sections. I made a quick demo in the notes of my phone. For me, once I start writing a song, it possesses me for a couple of days. The next day, on the bus to work and while walking on Sandymount beach on my lunch break, I listened to the recording I’d made again and again. This helps me to figure out what is and isn’t working in terms of lyrics and structure. I began writing the third section while walking on the beach that day, hence it opens with the line ‘warm air and golden sand, take me to the sea.’ I made voice notes of all of the changes that had occurred to me throughout the day, and I recorded what I had written that night. By this stage, I had written the entire song, but I had filled out the last section with some ‘lazy metaphors’ (as per my mother’s insightful critique of that draft!).

For me, the hardest part always comes here; tightening up the final lyrics. I usually find that some golden lines have come to me on inspiration while writing, and some others don’t serve the song. I brainstormed to figure out exactly what the song was saying, and where it should say what. I can spend hours at this stage replacing a meaningless line or word; I wrote an eight page long stream of consciousness, and found the last few lyrics within it; ‘take it slow, cause I don’t know how open I can be/ Understand, this is not who I am, it’s who I’ve had to be/ But you mean it, and I feel it, so I’ll close my eyes and just breathe.’ This was very much a cathartic experience for me; these lyrics contained some difficult emotions I’d been dealing with over the past year. The feelings were related to illness, but appropriated in a song about love. I don’t think you always have to write about your own direct experience, as long as the emotional backstory is truthful.

At this stage, I had my main guitar line, lyrics, and vocals tied down. I started working on the arrangement in my home demo. This for me is the funniest part, it’s where I experiment with layers of backing vocals and instruments to build atmosphere. I added a strummed guitar layer and harmonies. I shared the demo with my cover artist and some friends. Janice Dooley, who designs my cover art, sent me back an idea quickly, and I loved it instantly. It features a sun setting over an ocean contained within two hands, and it inspired me to replace a line in the first verse with the line ‘sunset and time on our hands’.

I again listened to the demo many times, and made some changes to the arrangement. Then it was time to record! I recorded the guitars with Zak Higgins, who added a third guitar line in places, which I loved; low and melancholic, it complemented the higher guitar line I had written perfectly. I recorded the vocals myself and worked on the final mix/master with Michael Richards. Nothing else changed in the studio; I put a huge amount of work into the arrangement before recording, and so it was pretty much locked in.