Hitting the snooze button

The chords to '5 minutes more' had been swimming around in my head for some time, I just hadn't been sure what to do with them. Once the concept for 'Me for a day' came to me, the relaxed, circular chords suggested that swimming half-consciousness in between cycles of the snooze on your alarm clock. For me this is one of the best feelings there is: I'm not a wake-up-and-up-and-at-them kind of person.

Aside from the inverted chord structure - where the instrumental bit is Em-A, which switches to A-Em for the vocal verses - the first sonic idea I tried to develop was the background vocals.  I've got a couple of early demo versions with about 18 vocal over-dubs saturated in reverb trying to get the choral effect I had in mind. No lyrics at all - just lots of 'ahhhs' over and over (a bit tedious with nothing else around it on the demos).

The lyrics did come eventually though, mostly improvised one sunny morning sitting in a red armchair by the window of our my apartment in Japan.  Unusually for me, when I came to record them I didn't have a set idea of how they would fit.  And this led to some happy overlaps in different takes that worked really well in the verse after the trumpet solo, adding to that dreamy, not quite sure if I'm dreaming or really talking to you kind of state.

Somewhere along the line I stumbled on the 'boodly' guitar sound (as I named it in the sequencer), which became a theme that I managed to insert in a couple of other points of the album. I was particularly pleased with that sound - though I've lost the preset I made for it so will probably never be able to re-create it, sob.  Oh, well, the wonders of fleeting beauty, etc.

And for those of you wondering: that is a NZ bellbird you can hear at the start and end of the track, merging in with the second track Frank Sinatra.  I guess that's one of the happiest sounds there is.