Continuing from part 1 (a jam), we pick up with the evolution of the song “The Next Minute” which will be included on our upcoming record As Big As You Can Get It.

Typically after a studio night is over, the guys head home and I stay up until the wee hours trying to slice and dice the 12 – 20 minutes of amorphous jamming into some kind of rough song structure. I might add some different loops or drum parts, and I’ll usually find the best parts of the jam (a.k.a. the parts where we aren’t just sucking completely) and move them around.

Usually the first edit winds up being pretty simple: verse + chorus.  No bridge, no intros or other bits. Sometimes we don’t even get a chorus. I also try to give the rough edit some kind of placeholder name. The rough edit had a kind of driving feel that reminded me of Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks”, so I tagged the song idea as “Keep Raining”.

In this case we got what we felt was a solid verse along with a bass break. We didn’t really have a defined chorus, but this first edit gave us a seed that we could water (with idea juice, of course) and cultivate into something bigger and better.

[audio:2009-09-02_KeepRaining.mp3]

Coming up: the demo edit