FICTION

I sometimes go through phases where I try to write songs I could imagine a famous band or artist playing. Normally each artist gets one phase, then I move on - Weezer are an exception. I’ve tried to write a thousand Weezer songs in my life, with varying results.

This was one of the success stories, I feel - even if it ended up sounding nothing like Weezer (much like Weezer themselves, these days).

It began in 2008, I think, making it one of the most recently-penned tracks from ‘Battletech’. It was initially just the power chord verses, with a fairly monotone, wordless melody. The bridge/chorus chords came soon after, but it wasn’t until I recorded it that it really took shape - there was no demo version, what you hear on the album was the first and only attempt at putting it together.

For example, the synth lead that underpins the entire bridge (bit after the verse but before the chorus) was only added as a way of making the bassline melody stand out, and ended up being perhaps the catchiest phrase in the whole song. It also leads nicely into the guitar solo, contributed by R William Murphy - he who helped write ‘The Purpose Of Man’. I told him ‘like van Halen’, which is probably the first and last time I’ll ever ask for something with those words.

The vocals were one of the first I tried using software to do pitch correction, and found by doubling it up with octave higher and lower backing vocals, it gave the song an other-worldy, robotic kind of feel. I utilised the technique to fill in vocals on the other songs, liking what I heard here. Because the verse melody on ‘Fiction’ is quite plain - all the catchiness there being in the chords, really - it helped make the vocals stand out, sound more interesting.

The lyrics are one of my signature mish-mashes of two different ideas; one which came with the chords, and one when I actually sat down to flesh everything out so I could record it. The first idea is that gossip - lies in particular - doesn’t spread by itself. Pretty obvious, really. It takes people to pass it on, and people get a kick out of it - else they wouldn’t do it. In other words, fiction is a lazy bitch, or as the song puts it, Yoda-style, ’such a lazy bitch, fiction is’.

The second angle is basically an attack on the current National Party. They’re always good for a kicking, and last time they were in power I could barely even play the guitar. Still can’t, but hey.

And no, I don’t know why the tom roll going into the second chorus is so quiet. I must have accidentally muted the close mics when I was putting it all together, and by the time I realised something was wrong I couldn’t be arsed remixing it. One mixing error that made the master is still about 5000 less than the Beatles had, per song…

LINK: DOWNLOAD ‘FICTION’

Mirrored from Radio Over Moscow.