Overall Theme
Those hours when you are laying in bed and wondering how time works….. woah that got a little lofty out of the gate, but in all seriousness, everyone considers their place in the universe, their meaning in the world, or has a realization of self-purpose; its a natural landing zone of human curiosity. “Time Is Softer” is a meditation on the pains of our past and the wounds of an anxious outlook; struggling to realize what’s important within our thin slice of time. Being alone can bring out the true identity of a person and some people can handle that; others can’t. There’s a moment when you realize that life is too short to worry and to take notice of the people/person next to you. There is infinity in the conversations and memories we make with the people right by our side.
The song initially started out as a standard 4/4 downtempo pop song demo. 808 Drum machine, really fast hihats, auto tune, lots of soft synths. Mmmm……I thought it was great at the time. Kristen and I finally decided it didn’t fit “us” and our sound, but we still loved the lyrics and the theme.
Guitars
So Kristen asked me to redo the whole song. I’m glad she did. So beginning the new project I recorded a couple scratch tracks with the new key, tempo and time signature. I actually was never able to fully recreate the main acoustic part when we did overdubs later so the main acoustic guitar you hear is from the first initial scratch recordings. It was done with my old arch top guitar that I believe was made in the 20’s or 30’s. Really high string height and super hard to play. A few years ago I installed a piezo pickup on the bridge. So for this I plugged it straight into my pedalboard and ran it through some guitar pedals.
By itself it sounds like this in the first chorus:
We also had some 12 string, classical guitar, and banjo to add some brightness and more tonal body since the scratch guitar we ended up using is on the thinner side tonally. Combined it all sounds like this in the first chorus:
Texture
Earlier in the intro you might have noticed the blips and electronic noises at the beginning. I wanted to represent time in little flashes that are unpredictable, but when they triggered I wanted them to still have some kind of pattern. The initial sound source for this was some scratch bass ideas that I didn’t end up using. I pitched them up, arpeggiated them, and then sampled that into a single sound. After I captured that sample, I stretched its length and re-pitched to create another new sample.
That by itself sounds like this:
Vocals
We wanted to make sure the vocals sounding ghostly and not too dry so we stacked our vocals with us singing the melody in octave unison most of the song. To continue that feel, but with some more harmonic interest in last half of the song, we added some bgv oohs, vocoder, and opera notes (Kristen) in the outro.
That sounds like this in the last chorus:
Bass
To try something and give ourselves a creative limitation, we didn’t want to track electric bass so we instead used a Moog synth for our bass sounds. Nothing fancy; just sustained and filtered bass tone to just add more weight in the bigger sections.
That sounds like this:
Drums
The drums are interesting. We wanted this to also embody the sampled sounds we mentioned earlier and make sure there was a busy-ness and hurried feel to create the idea chaos/anxiety. There is actually two layers of drums. We tracked our own isolated drums first and you’ll mainly hear that in the tom fills going into the hook, “time is softer with you” sections. There’s also some ride cymbals, marching snare, sub kick, and programmed drum sounds. Then we asked our friend JT Bates to send some drum files over to us to fold more authentic sounds when needed. He knocks it out of the park every time! Those combined sounds like this in the last chorus:
Keys
The keys layer is more felt than heard. The most notable part is the piano. We wanted to have a slight poly rhythm thing to dance with the already abundant arpeggiated layers happening. The piano layer brings a slowness and counter thought to the melody and other supporting layers.
Everything in the keys layer sounds like this in Chorus 1:
We really enjoyed making this song and it was one of the early songs that we wrote this year. We are happy to see it come into the world and finally into your ears. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do. Thanks for reading to the end and “nerding” out with us!
