I started “You Love” about three years ago, as a lyric-writing exercise. I do these a lot, because writing lyrics is a never-ending struggle to fill a bucket with a hole in it. If I can occupy my mind with arbitrary rules about rhyme structure, then I don’t spend as much time wondering what in the world to write in the first place. Also, I thought it would be fun to write something in second person, like “Captain Jack” or “Kid Charlemagne”, except about love and hope and not, y’know, junkies. It took a while to finish, and then sat in a note on my iPad for even longer. Eventually, I was looking for something to use as my next choral piece, so I wrote the arrangement over the summer, and taught it to Vocal Ensemble soon after our winter concert. We were on track to perform this new piece at the RIMEA Choral Festival in March, and then the world went into lockdown.
We would have recorded it anyway, but once COVID-19 took over, we couldn’t even use our meager recording facilities at the school. So each student sang their part into a phone, while listening to the backing track with earplugs, and we began the INCREDIBLY TEDIOUS task of manually assembling a chorus. I’d guess that each track took at least an hour and a half of cleanup before it was in decent-enough shape to add to the project. Then the real fun started, with lining up entrances, fixing timing and tuning, and just generally being obsessive. The audio for this three-minute song probably took eighty hours of work. I’m not complaining, though; we got something special, and it sounds like what they sound like when they sing together, which is to say, fantastic.
