I am very proud and overjoyed and all the feelings and SO MANY TEARS THIS WEEK pleased to present the first "official" collaboration of WB2026 between myself and my dear friend, my cosmic brother out there beyond the stars, the legendary jwh. He was even kind enough to loan me the cover graphic he made for our song, and if you have visited here first, be sure to go comment on his page for this song this week too.
jwh: acoustic guitar, vocals, field recording, lyrics
neon liminal: piano, vocals, electric guitar, lyrics, thunder, space nonsense, coughing
There's a lot of typing and manic words and I apologize for the disorganization but on with the spoiler tags:
› The Story‹ The StoryI met Josh during Weekly Beats 2024, and we collaborated on a few wonderful songs together, but the most special came towards the end of the year. I composed The Pulsar Suite in November of that year, during which time our beloved dog of 16 years, Max, was dying; he passed away in mid-December, and around that time, Josh reached out to collaborate on a song, and I sent him some droning space-ambient, and Josh gifted me and my family with brother, can you hear me?, and it was a wonderful, magical, healing song I could have never imagined being part of. Thank you again, Josh.
Please give it a listen while you are here, because it's painfully beautiful and really helped me through a very dark time.
Since then, we have lost all our dogs, and that song has always been something comforting, even if it brings tears every time I listen. And probably most people's fave track off The Pulsar Suite lol.
This past week, Josh mentioned having a song idea for a collaboration as a follow up to brother, can you hear me? and sent me a short little recording - and it was beautiful, fragile, and touched that same deep, indescribable place as its predecessor, and it's kinda magic to be connected to something that powerful.
Anyway, Josh did some recording and sent me some stems, and early on after I got them I asked him to let me run with it - he'd done enough, I could do the rest, and bless him for trusting me and my crazy lol.
I think the result is wonderful. I'll ramble more about this below, but it's really magical, and something I feel could only be created working with Josh - I would never be able to make something like this on my own.
› Production Notes‹ Production Notes
Early in the week, Josh sent me some stems - a few acoustic guitar recordings, a few vocal tracks, and he used a clever method to add some "air" and atmosphere, by encouraging a little "mic bleed" - essentially, having the "backing" track play through an amp while recording a vocal, so that a little bit of the whole song is playing very low in the background.
It really gave the stems he sent a very intimate, precious and fragile feel - a moment in a basement studio, shared with friends, that exists in that ephemeral space of time and environment and vanishes so soon afterwards. It was a whole song on its own, given life by that simple way of bringing some of the "space" into the recording itself.
Josh also varied the timing of his lyrics on his vocals, so there's a wonderful 'echo effect' at work which I also tried to replicate in other parts of the song.
I started playing with Josh's stems, and while I was just trying to work out the chords and a few notes, stumbled on the really simple but (I think) charming piano "riff" that plays through the piece. With a little effort I managed to get the piano to sound like it was in the same space as Josh and his guitar, and these three parts - Josh's vocal, Josh's guitar, and my piano - I knew we had the backbone of the song.
I wanted to play with the mic-bleed experiment, so initially I decided to record my own vocals singing along with Josh - and I ran the playback through my big amp and recorded nearly a dozen takes ... most of which never made it into the final track, lol.
(I did keep my cough at the very beginning though lol).
This was because the same day as recording my own vocals to Josh's verse - the same night - literally as I was getting out of the tub - I got inspired with an idea for a second verse, just a simple variation on the first, that played to my own space-cowboy themes.
So yeah, 2am, damp from a hot bath, not wearing much more than my pyjamas, scribbling down lyrics in a notebook and then recording them in the studio with the backing from the amp again. I think I did 6-7 takes and knew I had what I needed.
And one more thing I'm proud of: no pitch correction, no Melodyne, just a little compression and EQ to do any "fixes" to my vocals. The rest is just effects for space and atmosphere.
There was some shuffling around on arrangement ideas, but I finally settled on the two-verse format we have - Josh's verse first, mine as a call-and-response. I built this into the skeleton of the song and finally sent what I had to Josh, who generously gave me just a little harmony backup singing for my verse which just sounds SO BEAUTIFUL. MORE TEARS. So much crying this week.
And it wouldn't be a Josh and Matt song if it wasn't ridiculously long and have some GIANT WALL OF SOUND SPACE AMBIENT, and that follows the verses, along with a nod to some other inspirations that came alongside the sorta fragile "loop" or "echo" nature of this song.
And then it was just a lot of working to get it all together ... the last thing I added was the electric guitar right at the end, a sort of thunder-back as the song echoes its way into space, and then we were mixing and mastering.
The mix wasn't difficult - I wanted to maintain the "basement recording" feel, as if Josh and I had been in the same room, so using things like Trackspacer and various noise-reduction and even some surgical EQ wasn't necessary or beneficial. The challenge there being on the master, the loudness bringing out some of that "atmosphere" a little too much. I think I did a good job balancing for less than an hours work, and when there's an album version we will obviously revisit the mix and master, but it came out well for the time I had.
Start to finish, a labour of love. If you have any questions on specifics, ask away!
› On Magic‹ On Magic
It's half an hour before this song goes live, and I don't know how I made it. I listen to it and I can remember the parts and what I did but where it came from - it just goes beyond what I can comprehend. It feels like magic.
And I have to say, I feel completely spoiled being able to collaborate with Josh - and other musicians - because it really is magical. We made something here impossible to create on our own, I know I could never have written these lyrics, or this progression, or captured the mood that Josh imbued into his stems that became this wonderful thing - I also know without all that, I wouldn't have had half the ideas I put into this song. This is not a song I can make on my own - it was only able to manifest because we worked on it together. Greater than the sum of its parts. Creating something unimagined when the components were apart.
I could ramble endlessly on this. But it comes down to that simple idea: this song is not something I could ever have predicted or imagined, let alone known I was going to be part of its creation. I feel the same about brother, can you hear me? and The Message ... and I guess that's the magic of bringing creative people together. They make things that can only exist in the ephemeral space of that connection.
I also feel that these powerful songs come from a place where the people involved are connected to the same "something" on a deep, emotional, almost instinctual level. Spiritual maybe. Touching the same source. I am gonna get all flakey if I continue on this ramble lol.
The point: Weekly Beats is magic. There are few places like this where you can meet musicians just making music because they love it, and they love music, and they love interacting with other people walking this same insane path of making a song every week for an entire year. If you hear something someone made and it sparked something in you, reach out, connect, try to make something together. Don't let your perceived skill level or experience stop you - Josh and I came from wildly different musical backgrounds, and he has decades more experience than I do. It's those differences that make what we do together so incredible.
At least, to me.
It's fucking magic, people.
Thank you everyone for listening, I hope the end of summer is treating you well <3
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