Jane Is Not Afraid is my partner Jane Stockwell and myself. After going to see Aussie Synth Pop legends Pseudo Echo, Jane announced that she wanted to write some songs. I advised learning the ropes a bit with a cover or two. A bit of time passed so I assumed that was it.
Then there was a song! I asked for MIDI and a guide vocal. It took a few false starts to get it working but “Time Carries On” was suddenly there as you hear it. There were a few more false starts as Jane had to make the usual rookie errors by controlling what should not be controlled. Once that phase was over, the next couple of songs came fairly fast around other life things incl. my Synth Pop project with Travis Tanner think+sync “The Runner”.
I suggested the aim should be an EP and envisioned the fourth track being more of a Benedict sound than just Synth Pop. I popped a few song fragment ideas in Jane’s folder and one suited this really well so we wrote this together at Jane’s workstation. After the guide vocal, I finessed things a bit. It was what I hoped for but too repetitive so a variation was written for the later verse. With a few amusements in tracking that vocal the hard work was done.
Videos
I made the two videos, the first was the dreaded lyric video. I have done many of these for clients.
It was always the plan to make a ‘live action’ video. Too few people will make them these days which is silly. It was both easy & hard as all things worth doing are. The results are worth it though. In no way was it ever meant to be anything but bootstrap. Nothing is live at all. We are clearly miming poorly to the track in front of a bed sheet. I barely attempted to pretend to play what I have never actually played seeing I mouse everything. It was so hot that we did one take – to find the second camera didn’t record. A bit of tarting up in DaVinci and ta da!
No A.I. – No AutoTune – No Loops
Jane & I were united in not using any sort of AI (which doesn’t exist anyway), AutoTune (or Melodyne, etc), or loops. It’s not the way that we see music. Seeing we wanted something that felt like the music that we grew up with, it had to be real and clearly the work of us in the time allotted to it. All work was by-hand and unique to each song. Most of the songs even had the drum sounds made in the project (no samples). Punk was D.I.Y. I am D.I.Y.
The biggest issue I faced was the sound of “Take You For Granted”. I had a softer version that I really liked but didn’t fit the overall sound of the EP and target audience. Never put off, I kept that version for comparison and to pop on the EP as a bonus. Anyone who prefers that version can use it instead.
Benedict Roff-Marsh 