lifeblood: songs: backgrounds: when you're gone, you're gone

amy ray quote from 2012-02-24: lung of love: a conversation with amy ray, the huffington post

mr: amy, let's discuss "when you're gone, you're gone." i have about 30 different interpretations of that one.

ar: yeah, i had a couple of interpretations of that song too because i wrote it from different places. i wrote it from a place of... i was actually at a friend's wedding and going through this whole scenario in my head, while waiting for everything to start, of what would happen if someone at this particular event stood up and protested, because that's a rarity at weddings when that happens. but i don't know, it was really based more on my friends' lives rather than my own and some past experiences in my own life and that idea that you get to this place with somebody and the other person is out of the relationship for a while and you realize that they are gone. and it's that moment of, "oh yeah, i guess, all these things i was thinking, we finally arrived," and it was more like a dream sequence instead of a real day-to-day life kind of thing. we finally arrived, and then you're actually gone, and i didn't realize it. that's where i was at in an abstract way with that song. for that song, it came out of this dreamy, lyrical story, and i was playing it almost like a rockabilly, pretty fast, almost like buddy holly or a fast everly brothers song. when i was in the studio, the producer greg and my drummer mel were all working on it and laboring on it, and he said, "let's just slow it down really slow and play the michael jackson "billie jean" beat." that's exactly what we did. we stayed up all night and taped it, so it was like one of those songs. i don't typically work that late into the night in a studio, i'm more productive during the day. but for some reason, that night, we got the take of it on our old analog tape machine and it has this voice quiver in it because the tape was warping, and all these things that went into it. for me, that song is as much about the experience of recording it and what happened during the process as it is about what the song is about. it just came out of this place of trying to look at something in a completely different way, which is sort of what the song is about too, so it worked for me.

mr: and it being the first song, it sets up the album with a real openness, it's a great introduction for what's coming after it.

ar: yeah, it's so funny. i didn't even think of the song in that way, i thought of it as a song that we did just for ourselves, in a way. we experimented with everything and it would just go in the record somewhere. trina shoemaker made the record, and when she was mixing it, she really hooked into that song. i was like, "wow, i never heard that song as being an opener or anything like that on this record. i thought of it more as a sleeper." she was like, "i think this defines the record." it's so funny when someone else is working on something with you and they see it so completely differently, and that's why it's good to work with other people, because if i'd been trying to be in charge of everything and have it be all my vision, i might not have done that, and it wouldn't have turned out as well. i think having her take the record away from me and greg and mix it and see her own vision before we had input, that's the best way to do it. she would work on mixes and we would revisit it with her, but let her do her thing first. i think that's the way to collaborate.

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amy ray quote from 2012-03-01: amy ray digs deep into the lung of love, glide magazine

when we last spoke about the recent indigo girls album beauty queen sister in the fall, we spent a lot of time discussing a stepping out on your part in terms of songwriting style with songs like "damo" and "yoke." on lung of love, i hear similar things in terms of construction and style- just pushing the envelope of the more usual pop/punk sound that you've established. would you ever consider doing a full-on, non-pop/punk type of record- or even a concept album?

yeah, i definitely would. it would depend on my writing process, though. i started a bunch of country songs that were popping up more frequently, so i just put them in a pile where eventually it will grow into its own project- and i know that's not that far away from my work right now, but it's a very decisive sound. and the same thing would happen for another style of music. if i start writing a song and i'm intrigued by the style or where it's going, if it's not necessarily something i've explored before, i'll be intentional about it and say something like, "i'm going to write beatles chord progressions for a year and see where it goes." that's what i like to do in my own time, because i learn a lot more about writing as well.

i don't feel tied to punk chord progressions at all, though. i do, however, feel tied to a philosophy of approaching life in a do-it-yourself kind of way, and that's very folk and punk. musically, though, i feel very broad-based. and working with greg griffiths, he's someone that will definitely pull out different textures in my music. he gets tired of the same sound- he'll say to me, "will you stop chunking on the guitar and do something different?" (laughs) he just hears things in a multitude of ways i might not. so, on a song sometimes he'll urge me not to play to see where it will go, and that's really helpful to me, because then i'll see a lot of possibility in the song, like it could start as a punk piece and then i'll see, through greg, that it could be an atmospheric dobro part instead of electric guitar. he tends to move songs out of my traditional realm and try to make it more interesting musically.

that happened with the opening track, "when you're gone, you're gone," if i remember correctly. you said that it began as an up-tempo rocker and then he suggested putting the "billie jean" beat behind it, which transformed it into this soulful, r&b-influenced song.

i'm really not overcompensating when i talk about greg, because i really believe that he's an amazing talent and i wish he could work with more people, but he's so busy with his job that he can't. he really is the person that stands up and gets you to think outside of the box, and he also doesn't cater to my ego, which is nice! he'll suggest other ways to approach a song if he feels what i'm doing isn't serving the purpose of the track, and i love a producer that will say that. when a producer is able to frame that without involving their own ego and without being threatening to you as an artist, it's an amazing thing. with this record, that really made the difference. i really needed that push, and i'm just so glad that it happened.

when emily and i were young, we were pretty hard-headed about our ideas about the songs, and we wouldn't listen to producers as much. we had to come around to that, though, which was definitely a struggle. and now i listen back to old records and i think we should have been listening more intently to producers all along, because the recordings could have been a lot better. so, when younger musicians who i'm close with talk to me about their own struggles with producers, i caution them to get too frustrated. because while their own ideas are important, collaboration is a huge step in honing your artistic skills, and a professional producer may just have some thoughts that could take the music to a whole new level. they may be the exact way to make it all better.