Words and music by Tom Sanderson
Slow down
You move too quick
You run that pace too long
you’ll end up sick
You’re lightning
and I’m slo-mo
There’s never time to rest
for you, although
you smile
but your battery’s drained
For what you’ve ventured,
is any gained?
Future
when we are gray
you’ll find simplicity
and live that dayConcrete and glass
Concrete and glass
You know you always
want to have it fastIt’s a grind
to my mind
and you are just an urban planner
When you find
streets unkind,
you’ll go and find a country manor
You’ll not be easily led
Soon you’ll get it through your headConcrete and glass
Concrete and glass
You know you always
want to have it fastWhen will you realize
there is life beyond these walls?
Maybe you’ll be free one day
from the skyscrapers, parking stallsTom: vocals, keyboards, guitar, drums
Lori Sanderson: cover art
Notes
When my family used to live in Palm Springs, CA. we would often go hiking on fair-weather weekends in the nearby hills. Sometimes during the hike, my parents would ask me what song was in my head. Normally, in absence of auditory stimuli, my mind starts playing back fragments of music. Often the music is blocks of recordings I have heard. Sometimes it is something new. While I was driving in June 2024, a 20-second block of music came in my head that was basically the chorus to this song. I shared the fragment with my cousin Alan who agreed it was a good idea.
The title to this song was originally the name of a Transfer Point recording that got renamed to “I Saw Your Face.” I thought the title was too good to abandon. Eventually I had another spontaneous idea for a verse section to this song (this fragment is now the segment that starts at 1:19 of this recording). I started assembling a sequence. Since I had the chorus looped a number of times, I though it would be neat to make a dropout/reduction of the chorus immediately after the introduction. One early snag I had was I didn’t refer back to my second demo when I starting sequencing this song on the Roland FA-06 and I had not committed this second fragment to memory, and it became a related segment which now starts at 2:05.
A few weeks into this project, I realized that the song structure wasn’t very symmetrical, especially compared to modern songwriting. I decided to embrace this deviation and went about trying to make each segment unique instead of purely copy-and-paste – the chorus is the exception as I thought it needed some glue to hold it together.
When the keyboard sequence was nearly done, I started writing lyrics, slowly at first but the process became easier as I went along. I’m not sure the moral voice in the verses is more like me or that I am more like the unnamed person in need of slowing down. Probably both are part of my experience. I think when I was a teenager I would try to distance myself from my errors by lecturing myself much like the narrator in this song – a bit of an unhealthy fragmentation. You can interpret the words as you’d prefer, but I think it’s an interesting take to think this character is a fragmented soul. Or the obvious perspective that it is perhaps an older, wiser character trying to save the younger one from the same pains he or she bore. Anyway, I digress…
I overdubbed a guitar, vocals and also got out my Yamaha Reface DX for some very period-specific FM synth sounds including using two separate patches for the lead synth part in the introduction. For the spoken robotic voice, I simply spoke the words in rhythm and used a bitcrusher filter – I was trying to go for a sound resembling the early 1980’s Texas Instruments Speak and Spell device. For a bit of fun, I’d welcome guesses as to what the robotic-sounding voice is really saying.
As far as inspiration, I think this song took many detours. The chorus had some general influence by the artist Tame Impala – I was trying to get his vocal sound but ended up with just a facsimile. A couple sections have an electric grand piano patch (a la the Yamaha CP80 from the late 70s – mid 1980s) played in eighth notes like a couple popular Hall and Oates tracks from the early 1980’s.
Alan Sanderson was invaluable in his suggestions. He is a wonderful collaborator in Transfer Point. Even when we are working on our own projects, I think we both value each other’s creative input to make something better. My brother Brian also helped me workshop the song in its early phases and we too enjoy helping each other with our own experiments.
Sanderson 