Song 4 - "Because of You"

Only 2 days after "Take your Time" winged it's way back to New Zealand on 27th October 2009, I finished my second song and sent it through for Rob's additions. This year (2010), I will have known my wife Gail for 10 years, but in all that time I had never written a song for her - about her - and although I never set out to make it so, this was to be it.

It's funny, but quite a lot of times, the strongest sounding line of lyric becomes the title to the song - and when writing this one, I found myself putting the words "because of you" at the end of each line, so the subject matter really wrote itself around that line.

The song has a bit of a latin beat - and is probably the most commercial sounding song on the whole album - something which gave me doubts once it was recorded. In fact, I am still not sure about this one even now - it just does not seem to sit in the same bracket as the others. When I first suggested the project to Rob, my very words were "we could produce songs in say the style of the Eagles" i.e. easy listening country type stuff - but this was the first time we had strayed completely away from that concept (we did with later songs too but this was the first).

Rob too, thought it was commercial but wanted to stick with the song to see what he could do with it. I was all for ditching it at this stage and would not learn what Rob would add for a few days, as this was the Melbourne Cup (horse race) weekend in Oz and it's a ritual of his to sit down with a few beers and not get involved in doing anything else. He picked the winner too, and no doubt sank a few on the proceeds.

I had to wait until the 8th November before I could send him the separate tracks for him to mix and add acoustic guitar, lead guitar and harmonies to. These eventually arrived on 28th November - mainly because Rob's third song had by now been written, recorded and sent to me for working on - but that is for the next chapter.

When the additions came through, they had certainly beefed up the song, so I was a little happier. Rob had worked hard on this one which made me a little less keen just to ditch it now. The one thing Rob had done was to soften each beat of the rim shot on the rhythm track - it was a little too prominent. He had to take each one (and there must have been over 100) and change the volume individually - something you can at least achieve with "Cool Edit" - the computer program that we were both using.

If only I had known - what had taken him ages I could have done in the flick of a switch on my keyboard (which also included the rhythm track). I can change the parameters for any one or group of notes in an instant this way and could have saved Rob a lot of hard work - I definately could not discard the song now.

The harmonies were very well done and fitted in nicely with the little bit of harmonising I had done on the song myself, and has he had heard the song so many times while working on it himself, Rob found that it had grown on him and he was even more happy to add it to the album.

Gail loved it too!! Here is a clip