It isn’t always easy to give it up

It isn’t always easy to throw it away

I know you want to throw your hands up

But what about yesterday

I can’t promise you anything but what I see from where I stand

I tell you everything I know and that I’m reaching for you

Now do you want to understand

The mind tries to be innocent- nobody wants to take the blame

But when you see that it’s just you in the way it’s the beginning of the pain

Most of the time- I’ll bring you back belief

What comes around if you can look into my eyes

It’s coming back to you so you can open up your mind and

Let go and surrender if you can let go

Deal with the pain I’m gonna keep you afloat

You can’t be anything you don’t want to feel

How long before nothings real again

Let go and surrender

Let go deal with the pain I’m gonna keep you afloat

You can’t be anything you don’t want to feel

How long before nothings real

There must be something you like

In the place that you hide

There must be something you don’t want to give away

What makes you want to stay

You can’t go anywhere to get to here

You’ve got to be here right now

The only way to stay is grab a hold of the day

But your hands are full of memories

You haven’t even been here before

So why are you telling me that you can’t take it anymore

I know it’s hard to believe that I’m not lying to you

But I got nothing less to lose at least we got today so you can

Let go and surrender if you can let go

Deal with the pain I’m gonna keep you afloat

You can’t be anything you don’t want to feel

How long before nothings real again

Let go and break down your defenses

Let go deal with the pain I’m gonna keep you afloat

You can’t be anything you don’t want to feel

How long before nothings real again

If there’s one song that’s going to make people say, “Damn Dr why did you put this one on the album”, this is the second one. This song was written for a woman, and was about the personal issues and experiences she had that were impeding our relationship. However they can just as easily be about anyone that uses their past as an excuse no to succeed. Listening to a playback of this song as I was working on the remix for An Anthology of Sorts I found it to be an appropriate message to myself. Which I suppose is a testament to the fact that I shouldn’t even be telling these stories, I should let folks get their own message. But I digress….

I wrote the music for this song while I was visiting my home town. The person I was visiting was at work, and I was actually using my car stereo as an amp for my electric guitar. Years earlier I had bought this little practice gadget that you could plug a guitar into, it had a tape player/recorder, and even came with a headset microphone. The headset microphone was long gone, but I could play my guitar through it, and I had the headphone jack running into a cassette adapter in my car stereo, and I was sitting in the hatchback area with guitar coming out the speakers on either side of me. It was here that I came up with the two different guitar parts for the verses.

I initially recorded this for Dr Wippit’s 1st Time Out with the old 8 track to cassette machine. I know I wanted the power chord guitar that opens the song to sound like Motley Crue’s first album even though that album was already 15 years old. I’ll always have the Crue’s first album on my top ten/desert island discs list. If there were ever an album that sounds like pure cocaine, that’s it. As a matter of fact that opening riff is almost completely stolen from Come On And Dance. The rest of the song seemed to add up mathematically and it seems like I programmed and played everything right, but the version that’s on the first Dr Wippit album just sounds terrible.

Fast forward fifteen more years, and I wanted to see if I could get this song to sound right. I dumped all the original instrumental tracks into my pc and figured I’d be able to clean them up and create separation I couldn’t get with the old school technology. An initial issue as that the old four track can only put out four tracks simultaneously, and I’d already learned that if you tried more than one pass, the timing wouldn’t be quite right. So if I wanted two guitars, bass, and drums, I had to give up on stereo drums. I did try to recreate stereo by copying the mono track and putting different eq on each one and then panning. Another one of the first things I tried was taking the harmonies I used in the last verse of the original version and putting them throughout the song. I decided they didn’t work everywhere, but it added to quite a few places. I put a significant amount of time into getting the guitars to sound better through eq and a lot of volume changes to make sure I could here what I wanted to hear for each part. In the end I’m pretty pleased with the final mix, it sounds like 90s glam rock meets Seattle with a touch of prog metal, what more could you ask for?