Day 25 - The day Whitney died….

Using analogue tape is a blessing, but can also be a curse. After each run we need to clean the tape heads, and check the biasing. And today the machine decided to be a little bit difficult on us. So after a run of more than 6 minutes or so, one side of the machine started to loose it’s level. And with six songs longer than 6 minutes, that proved to be a challenge. So it took a lot of time printing the songs, but in the end we got there.
During breakfast I was listening to some of the mixes, when I thought of making another bonus track: a radio-edit version of New Jerusalem. The song is 7:35 long, and we wanted to keep the edit-length of maximum 3:50. So we had to cut a lot of material. In the end we had a compact version of 3:48 minutes. We could not decide which solo to use, the guitar or the keyboard solo. So we did them both, so we can decide later. The compact version is rocking and I hope that some radio stations will play it. Ha! That would be killer!
Around 4pm I checked my Facebook, and red the shocking news that Whitney Houston passed away. She was found dead in her hotel room, just 30 minutes away from where I was. That was surreal! It’s a sad day, and very sad to see that such a great voice, such a great artist had to end like that. As I flipped through the channels, every news channel was covering the story and it looked like the whole world came to a hold. Understandable, as it shocking, and it’s a public person – but I can’t shake off the thought of the no-names that die every day in the slums of the cities and all the less fortunate people that you never hear about.
As surreal as it seems at such a moment, life goes on, and so did our mixing work. At 3am we where still printing mixes to tape, we had fun, it sounded awesome, but it was late!