Happy Ears: Bellow by Fairhazel
By Fairhazel
I wrote this song over Christmas, and I was really in love with it. I loved the image of “tore a hole in her pillow, for her screaming lungs to bellow”. That was the first line I had and I ran with the lyrics from there. The whole song came together in about 20 minutes, and I showed my wife Danielle. She suggested that the chorus was just me yelling “AAAA”. I really dug the idea so I turned that yell into the “I-I-I-I-I-I ain’t giving up”. I returned to LA after Christmas with my wife’s family and I recorded it at my studio at home. For all of my tracks, my drummer and pal Louis records in London. I had been talking to another friend of mine, who has drummed with me a few times, Matt Zajac, who is also killer, and we spoke about doing some songs together, so I thought I’d sent him this one. He nailed the vibe and brought a laidback but energetic life to it.
Up until this tune, I had steered pretty clear of MIDI instruments as I always thought that they were a bit of a cop out, but I couldn’t get these string parts out of my head for this one and some random wind parts so I used the BBC Symphony Orchestra from Spitfire Audio plugin to orchestrate it a little bit. Also for the wonderful nerds out there, I was messing around a bit with the guitar tones for my new stuff, and I got this amazing amp, super cheap, Tech 21 Traditional 60. It has a built in sans-amp XLR out, which is much easier for me that mic’ing up the amp as I live in a noisy 6-person house, and I run that through an 1176 and completely squash it and then double all the parts with an octave lower, and I’m really into how that sounds right now, I’ll be fiddling with that a little more on new songs.
Here’s a little playlist of songs that influenced the recording process:
Also here is a photo, it wasn't taken during my recording of Bellow, but it's in my studio with the same setup I would.
