Скачать с ютуб The story behind "Escape Is at Hand for the Travellin’ Man"... в хорошем качестве

The story behind "Escape Is at Hand for the Travellin’ Man"...

Like so many great Hip songs, Escape started with a drum beat at one of our wood shedding sessions. We recorded everything when we got together and would usually start off jamming so that our engineer, Mark Vreeken, could see if he had signal from all the inputs. Over the years we got “sound check” down to an art. We opened up countless shows and festivals with Grace, Too based on that idea. The drums would start, then the bass, Paul next then Bobby and Gord. By the end of the first verse Mark would have a great mix dialled in. For Escape I started playing the bass chord structure of Grace except with a rolling banjo style of picking to match Johnny’s beat. I kept droning the low E string while I monkeyed about with a melody up top. That suggested things to Bobby and Paul and they threw out more ideas which got Gord hooked and a melody quickly followed. He had chronicled his thoughts on the suicide of our friend Jim Ellison, from Material Issue, in his notebook and was able to massage those words into the lyrics for the song. It’s a moving tribute to Jim and a life spent out on the road. The song means even more to me now. Escape was great right out of the gate, but it needed someplace to go. In musical composition a bridge moves the tonal centre of a song and takes the listener on a trip. The bridge we came up with for Escape was just the ticket and by the end of the hour we had the demo for the song recorded. Gord’s words had so much emotional heft, he delivered them flawlessly and authentically that day. In fact, his vocal performance from the demo is the take you hear on the record. It was and still is the definitive version. – GS