This is an acoustic cover of a Lipsticism song called "All The Time."

Original: lipsticism.bandcamp.com/album/all-the-time-all-of-time

Earlier this year, Alana Schachtel aka Lipsticism, sent me a draft of a new song called "All The Time" that she was working on.

The song would become a common subject between us as I was captivated by it, and she was still exploring it. And we both knew who would end up mixing & mastering it LOL.

I've explained this before. I mentioned it in a Tik Tok a while ago, and I shared about it when I released Race For Titles. But I'll run through it again for you.

There is this thing that happens to me sometimes. I will get addicted to a song. Usually one that someone else writes, but not always. When this happens, I have to listen to it a LOT to get whatever it is out of my system. What can also happen is that I feel driven to remix it or even cover it in order to deal with the experience.

Why did this song lure me in and hook me? Let me see what I can pluck out of the abstract abyss of feels and thoughts that stem from my human & spiritual experiences & my interpretations thereof...

There is a series of pitch intervals Alana uses in the original that, since I was a youngin, have had a particular emotional impact on me. I called it the Great Emotional Impact in my single digits. That's what I thought I was going to call my music when I got older. (But then my "friends" would spell it out GEI for short, and then call me gay. LOL)

These particular pitch intervals can appear in different ways depending on the key of the song. You can even rearrange the order of the notes...but all three of them played in a sequence says something very nebulous but compelling to me, and my whole life I've been trying to figure out what it is, if anything.

When I hear these notes, my ears perk up. No matter what kind of music they appear in.

Most of my most favorite songs of all time have these 3 notes somewhere. MANY of mine do.

The funny thing is that although these intervals are something I've always been aware that I've been lugging around and using in my own music, I didn't realize that whenever they appear in other songs, I was being zapped them. Jolts of heart-piercing warmth balled up in my chest. I say "unknowingly" because I didn't realize that it was those notes, those intervals, that were making me feel that way, and experience that visceral, virtually somatic sensation.

Now that my wife has pointed out that the songs that I react to the most deeply typically have those intervals in it, I am hyper-aware of it. Now I keep track of all those songs for fun.

My song Race For Titles, which features Alana on vocals, features the aforementioned intervals, and so it's no surprise that this song was one of my addictions. She wrote all the vocals for it too, so it wasn't even my idea to use those notes. Even though I composed and produced the instrumental, I still needed to listen to it over and over for weeks to get whatever was going on inside me over with. Flushed out. Exorcised.

And just one more point to note about those 3 notes: There are many scenarios and contexts in which the delivery of those notes in a song don't get to me in the same way. It's not that these pitches and their relationship to each other come together like all those rings those kids had on the Captain Planet cartoon, causing some metaphysical synthesis of powers that manifest some kind of super-human. The delivery of these intervals matters. And most of the time, the rest of the song plays a large part. It just depends on whether the song seems to use those notes to garner up an emotion or vibe, or if they feel relatively arbitrary. They might not be arbitrary to the artist, but they might be in my experience.

Gosh...I'm not trying to talk this song up as being universally transcendent and eligible for rock n' roll canon. I'm just generally and perpetually excited about this phenomenon of 3 specific notes having a unique and significant impact on my lived experience. That's an interesting subject to me.

But today, it's all just a setup for introducing to you an acoustic singer-songwriter-style cover of my friend's 90s-esque dream pop song. Which is not something I ever thought I'd do as plain ol' Fire-Toolz. But why not. I've done all the other shit I've done. How is this any different.

But anyway, back to All The Time.

I was present (via text messages and attachments) throughout the creation of the original version of All The Time. My creative and compositional contributions to it were minimal, but in typical fashion, I was slated to mix and master in the end.

I decided that in order for me to further process whatever needed to be internally processed regarding the song, I would chop out the outro and do a bit of a MindSpring Memories-style remix. Stretch it out, pitch it down, loop it, make it slushy.

Inevitably I showed it to Alana, expecting a positive but mild reaction. It was more for me. I needed to create it. Showing her was just me being like... heyyy I was messing around, check this out.

Surprisingly, Alana was so excited by it that she decided to make it a B-side for the All The Time single. She added additional vocals to it as well. I wrote a simple bassline for it because if we already expanded on my silly little idea, we may as well expand on it some more.

Alana tweaked that bassline and some vocals, and that was that.

Now fast forward to a few days later. I still got the All The Time itch.

I had a goofy idea to pick up my acoustic and cover it, reharmonizing a lot of it but still staying true to the melody. I send it to Alana with the intention of making her go "holy shit LOL this rules" or something a nice friend would say about something relatively decent they made.

When I finished it, I was surprised it turned out as good as it did, so I was thinking that maybe I would just release it as Fire-Toolz song. And surprise followers with an unexpected singer/songwriter-esque cover of another small artist. Curveballs are fun to throw at people.

But it turns out the ball landed on a mountain which caused an avalanche.

Alana was somehow utterly floored by the cover. So she Recorded her own vocals on it, which were essentially doubles of what I was singing, which were exactly what she sang in the original.

This is the part of the story you make a joke about the movie Inception. Come on now...get it out of your system.

I proceeded to mix the song to be dreamy and lush and kind of psychedelic, with a little slushwave touch. I ended up sampling the original, processing the shit out of it, filtering it, and pushing it into the very background of the mix. You can hear it in some of the more bare spots. So you could say that MindSpring Memories makes an appearance.

Alana sent me a sister image to the image she used for the original single for the cover. It's very unlike what you'd normally see from me, and it reminded me so much of my teenage years for some reason, so I was eager to use it.

After adding and editing some adlibs and harmonies, I mastered it and uploaded it to streaming without hesitation.

When people say they are wild and spontaneous, they mean like...recording acoustic covers of your friend's songs and getting them to sing on them and then releasing them without much forethought within the span of a week and a half, right?