I do like this one!! This is a song I wrote some time ago, partially inspired by the Anime movie Paprika by Satoshi Kon, the brilliant director who also created Millennium Actress & the wonderful Tokyo Godfathers. I highly recommend his work, which really stretched both the field of Anime and the art of storytelling in major ways. He sadly passed away in 2010, but he leaves a fascinating and moving legacy.
When I wrote and recorded this I originally did it just on the acoustic guitar, tuned in an open tuning (I think DGDGAD), and with a shaker loop to keep my timing honest in case I wanted to add something later. MUCH later, I added a percussion track. Later still, when I was working on my Crazy Project (I was challenging myself to finish a song a week), I contacted my old friend Paul Vornhagen to help with a flute track. Paul is a wonderful guy and a fantastic multi-instrumentalist, an accomplished Jazz musician and very knowledgeable about Latin music, and Cuban music in particular. He agreed to come in and laid down two takes of flute, both of which were great. I took a bit from one and a bit from another, edited that just a little, but very little. I re-recorded my vocal (I'd had a scratch track I put up just before Paul got there), and added a bass part, and that was that!! A little mixing and mastering stuff and I was finished.
The theme of this song is something that I feel more and more as time goes on...we're all haunted. If you live long enough, you will be. Time presents us with ghosts, in the form of memories, of old feelings that appear in the middle of the night to surprise, scare or delight you. I think the best thing we can do is to be aware of their presence, because then you can try to deal with them accordingly. Either embrace them, fight them or let them go, but don't ignore them. That's the dangerous option!!!
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