Into the Dream: Part 1
Piano Ballad. Released October 27, 2001
I had been working diligently on another piece, when I felt the need to stray. After doling out hours and hours to Arabian themes, heavy-hitting percussion, and tiring progressions, sitting at my piano and playing this piece was a breath of fresh air. Many of the chord changes in this piece had been played before and were being saved for a song such as this. It took no more than a few hours to work out the entire piece on the piano, and the recording began immediately afterward. I laid down all of the piano live in no more than two hours, deciding that the slightly rough sound was perfect for the song. No post-production or editing was done to the piano once it was recorded.
This song is remnant of White in many ways, as it is basically built around me sitting at my piano and trying to feel a moment. The additions of the various instruments heighten that feeling, creating a rather emotional piece overall. I’m not usually prone to writing this style of music though, focusing instead on louder, more obscure works. Every now and again however, I sit down at the piano and something like this comes forth. It’s a feeling that can only be told by the piano, so rather than rant and rave on here I’ll allow it to tell the story.
I chose a light bass guitar for some simple depth, and a saxophone to fill some simple harmony in the piece. Strings are used ever so lightly to round out the guitar solo, which came to be as beautiful as I’d heard in my mind. The percussion was kept simple, but covered many variations to fit each individual section.
The most notable moment in the piece was when I actually decided to take what was a beautiful piano solo and make it a duet with a guitar. The harmony in the lower piano registers made the song work for me on all levels, and I knew it had to be recorded. I tried to keep things simple, as I have a tendency to get complex in everything I write, and the results are, if I may say, absolutely beautiful.
The entire work clocks in at just over twelve minutes, with this part rounding up about five of them. The second part employs much more drastic chord changes and takes a slightly different approach to climaxes and swells. It is certainly not out of the light ballad realm, but simply does not carry the emotion that this first section does. For that reason, I decided to split the song into parts and work on them individually. The second part will be available here shortly, along with the combined single work.
