Desired Constellation

Olivier Alary (Ensemble) had sent me a CD with a few sketches, and said "if you ever feel like using those, please do." A year later, I wrote this melody and was singing it in a cabin by a lake here in Iceland in january 2004. That was like the first little trips away from my little girl - I would go three hours a day to this cabin by the lake and do whatever I could and then drive back to town. I would sing several versions of this melody, and then I would say "wait a minute, this is this thing that Olivier gave me a year ago" so then I sang it to that and it fitted perfect together, it was really incredible ! Then when I came back from the tour and discovered that the whole album was gonna be a vocal album, I thought "wait a minute, what about this song here, I really like this song and it should be on the album". So I started doing choir arrangements for it. I did a really complicated choir arrangement, for like a sixteen piece choir, and recorded it three times doing totally different things, and it was like 50 tracks of voices, but it just wasn’t right, so I kept editing it on and spent like days and weeks editing it, and it never was right. Then I emailed Olivier and said "Listen, I’ve tried everything with this track, but I can’t just be dogmatic about this album. At the end of the day, the best music’s gotta win. So I think I’m just gonna stick to your old version, because I think that’s still the best one." And then he just said "Guess what ! I made it out of your own voice !" So he actually took a voice of mine, saying "I’m not sure what to do with it" from Hidden Place and did a song out of that ! And then he sent it it to me, and didn’t tell me, just in case I didn’t .. you know, whatever... it was just a secret !

Mixing It, August 20, 2004