| Will
has also written a short piece on why he chose to make RETURNING
at this time.
RETURNING is a
collection of new recordings of my favorite guitar solos over 35
years of composing.
The first question I suppose I need to answer for myself (and then
for you) is why I’m doing a record like RETURNING 30 years
after my career began.
In 1975 I was working as a general contractor and had a building
company called Windham Hill Builders. I had played some guitar for
theater productions at Stanford University and played in stairwells
and various places around Stanford that offered some natural reverberation.
As the result, a number of people had heard my music despite the
fact that I’d never played a paying gig in my life. It was
this group of friends and informal fans who got together and collected
about $ 300 in five dollar bills to send me into a recording studio.
I picked a studio out of the phone book named Mantra Studios (it
was the 70s after all!) I walked into that room and made a record
I called THE SEARCH FOR THE TURTLE’S NAVEL in two afternoons.
Around that recording I created a record label I called Windham
Hill Records. I promise you I had no idea of what was to become
of me or Windham Hill.
The songs I recorded in those two afternoons (and the music I recorded
for much of my early career) hopefully revealed some good composition
and it was clear that people related to the pieces emotionally in
very gratifying ways. But the kid who recorded them was basically
scared to death. Just being in a studio was intimidating and my
heart was pumping enough adrenaline through my system to fuel an
Arnold Schwartzneger’s movie. Listening back to these pieces
now I hear myself trying to get the notes in the right order and
avoid any terrible mistakes, but I don’t hear any of the nuance
and ebb and flow that the pieces reveal when I perform them today.
My ambition in performance is to be emotionally connected to every
note I play; I know that sounds like a canned statement, but I swear
it’s the truth. I’ve played pieces like THE BRICKLAYER’S
BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTER and THE IMPENDING DEATH OF THE VIRGIN SPIRIT
literally thousands of times, but kick myself if I ever leave the
stage feeling as if I haven’t felt the emotion of the songs
or had the sense that I was discovering them for the first time.
Today these pieces move as they wish and I pretty much follow. Their
tempo varies all over the place. They range from almost bombastic
to impossibly quiet. I move my hand toward the sound hole to soften
the notes and move back to the bridge to give them edge. All these
variables change with each performance. I never know if the bridge
of a song is going to be loud or soft, whether it will speed up
or slow down. It is exactly this emotional connection that I wanted
to feel in these recordings… it was the living, breathing
ebb and flow I’ve come to know exists in these pieces that
I wanted to capture in these recordings. And it was precisely the
lack of it in my earlier recordings that I wanted to improve upon.
When you’re 55 you begin to think of what will be left behind
when you’re gone and I knew I wanted these songs to be left
behind in a way that more completely reflected my knowledge of them
and what they were meant to be.
There are a few technical issues that are significant in the recordings
for RETURNING as well. For my first and second albums I was recording
onto half inch tape at seven and a half inches of tape per second.
That way you use less tape and spend less money. You also get an
inferior sound. At bit later I graduated to fifteen inches per second,
but it wasn’t until much later that I heard the difference
between that and thirty inches per second on a STUDER tape machine.
It was a learning curve and I was at the bottom of it. The early
recordings sometimes sound like music boxes to me… sweet,
but tiny and offering very little of the range of the guitar or
its’ richness.
In those days we were recording in an analogue medium and my early
recordings didn’t employ anything very sophisticated in the
way of noise filtering. Some of the very intimate passages I record
today would simply have disappeared in a world of tape hiss that
would have masked my notes. Today I’m recording in my own
Imaginary Road Studios in Windham County, Vermont on utterly state
of the art digital equipment (for audiophiles I wish to note that
I chose to run the digital master through analogue heads while mastering
with Bob Ludwig at Gateway Mastering to warm the sound). Just one
of the four modified Neumann mics I am recording into today is worth
more than the recording budget of my first four records combined;
they’re that sophisticated, that good and that important.
There are other contrasts, but just these two make all the difference
in the world to the sound of RETURNING. It all brings me closer
to what I hear as I sit alone and play; touching the sound as it
literally moves through my body as well as my ears. I guess I am
trying to find a sound that lets you hear what I hear. That too
is why I wanted to record RETURNING.
Any discussion of the difference between the early recordings and
those on this new collection also needs to include the guitars themselves.
My first recordings were made with good off-the-rack production
guitars. I didn’t even know that guitars existed that were
made my hand. Today I am playing instruments made for me by the
most talented guitar builders on earth. The sound that comes from
one of my Froggy Bottom guitars by Michael Millard and Andy Mueller
is simply unique and irreplaceable. My favorite instrument on earth
was damaged after a concert and it took well over a year to have
it properly repaired. I feared that it might return to me compromised
in some way. I had held off recording RETURNING until the repair
was done and much of my hope for this record hung in the balance
when I played the first few notes on the guitar. I played for a
few minutes and literally wept to have this friend returned to me…
a friend that produces sound richer than I’ve ever experienced
from any guitar I’ve ever touched.
These are the reasons I recorded RETURNING.
|
14 songs transcribed note for note