How To Paint An Owl

I wrote this song after reading a blog post by Juliette Crane about a painting she was working on.

In addition to selling her own beautiful paintings, Juliette teaches in person and online mixed media workshops. Her online class "How To Paint An Owl" includes several time-lapse videos that follow her paintings from start to finish. I've seen a few segments and they are gorgeous documents of the creative process. Quite inspiring.

Juliette asked if she could use music from The Wiggly Tendrils in her videos (we of course said yes), but I felt she should have a song of her own. So I sat down to write this tune.

Working out the lyrics for "How To Paint An Owl"

I knew I wanted the chorus to be the title of Juliette's e-course "how to paint an owl." Reading Juliette's blog I saw her post about an unfinished painting I was struck by the starless night above the main character. That starless night and the lamppost reminded me of C. S. Lewis's description of the beginning of Narnia. I was imagining that the beginning a painting must be like the beginning of the world, and I thought the picture looked so right just there in its unfinished form. I had to write about it.

12 years old and still sounding good

Once the song was written, I recorded it on my new Portastudio 414 cassette 4-track. I haven't gotten around to buying any new cassette tapes, so I used a 12 year old Maxel XLII tape that I had used to bootleg a concert. Considering the tape's age, I'm amazed this recording sounds as good as it does. 

I recorded two tracks of acoustic guitar. One with a capo and one without. Then two tracks of vocals. For the higher harmony part, I used the pitch control to pitch the song up while recording it, then slowed it back down on play back. It makes the vocal sound a bit heavy and lethargic. There's something interesting about hearing the higher vocal part in a slightly slowed down tone. I will definitely try that again.

The Portastudio has stereo RCA outs, but I only could find one of my RCA to quarter inch mono adaptors. I imported each track into logic one at a time and mixed the recording in logic. I added some compression, EQ and reverb to each track and then bounced it down to wave.

Here it is: