THE FIRES OF WINTER
CHRISTOPHER V. L. GIFFUNI
TRACKLIST
- MY BACK PAGES
- WHEN YOU GO
- MOTHERS PROTECT THEIR YOUNG
- CANYON RUNNER
- SISTER GOLDEN HAIR
- JUSTIN VISITS FERNANDO’S HOUSE
- THUNDERING HORSES
- GLACIERS AND SNOWDRIFTS
- THE OVERTURE
- THE FIRES OF WINTER (including THREE BOYS AND A HOME)
- STONE JAM
- CAP JALUCA AND OCEAN TERRACE
THE FIRES OF WINTER – WRITE-UP
As I have worked on the notes for this album, I realized that the only people who actually may be interested in this, might be my descendants. My immediate family (and I am sure my grandchildren when they come) are so used to this eccentric form of self indulgence, that they could care less (and actually are tired of hearing it!!) But, if later generations come upon it, I am sure, that as I would have if I found such stuff from an ancestor, they might actually find it interesting. So what follows is geared toward them-whoever they (you) may be!!
With the exceptions noted, all of this was recorded in my basement studio at 11 Walden Place, Huntington New York 11743 (strictly for my personal enjoyment and outlet) and finalized 7/14/00 as a big thunderstorm approached. I keep a journal in Lotus 123 (Studionotes.123) of the dates work is done and what is worked on. I have an extensive library of professionally recorded music that I have purchased throughout my lifetime that inspires me and that I enjoy listening to greatly. I also periodically record my own “mixes” of songs done on albums I purchase of the songs I think best. They are typically broken out by type of music and given names so I can keep track of them. This process originally started in High School so I could play stuff in the car that was on vinyl record albums I had at home, but as technology changed, I really just continued to do it more for fun and as an archive for others to listen to in the future. As of July 2000 such mixes are on cassette tape but from here on will be on CD.
I keep two loose-leaf binders of information. One related to songs and music theory, the other related to hardware and equipment that I use. What I have recorded so far has been done at the dawn of personal computers and therefore I spent as much time getting the equipment to work as I have creating the music. This is finally changing as I write this in mid 2000. The attached instrument and equipment list details what I have used.
The following songs were done from January ’95 through July ‘00. You can hear the improving ability from experience in doing this and more importantly the technology advances made in my studio equipment. From Justin’s song (Track 7) on, the equipment really made a difference. Remember, these songs are presented for the song, not the performance. -CVLG 7/14/00
THE FIRES OF WINTER :
I. A PRELUDE OF SEASONS
a) Late Spring
1) Felling A Tree
2) Swinging the Axe
b) Mid Summer
1) Strong Drying Winds
2) To Build a Roof
c) Late Summer
1) Stacking the Cords
2) Storing the Screens
II. THE FIRST FIRE OF WINTER
a) Late Summer Chills
b) Autumns first Whisper
c) A First Blast of Cold
d) First Fire of Winter
III. THE DEPTH OF THE DARKNESS
a) It’s Frozen Out There
b) Wind Driven Snow
c) A Place By the Fire
d) A Hint of the Sun?
IV. THE LAST FIRE OF WINTER
a) Ceremonial Lighting – The Last Fire of Winter
b) Sparks in the Draft
c) The Embers Grow Cold
d) Disbursing the Ashes
e) The Warmth of the Sun
V. CONCLUSION
a) Three Boys and a Home
STONE JAM
CAPJALUCA
OCEAN TERRACE
My Back Pages
A Bob Dylan song made famous by The Byrds. The Byrds performing his songs are among my most favorite music. Him performing his songs, among my least!! Check out these lyrics, they are amazing. Check out The Byrds!!This track confirms I cannot sing, but I do like the twelve string solo in the middle (using my special edition Roger McGuinnRickenbacker).
When You Go
Performed on a classical nylon string guitar. The intro was one thing that showed up and the rest came later. One of those things that drove the family nuts as I constantly played it as I developed it. One of the last analog 4 track cassette recordings done before the move to digital which provides a much more professional way of recording and editing. Compare this to the acoustic guitars on the Fires of Winter which was recorded and edited digitally. The analog tape sound is warmer but the digital stuff is much more professional.
Mothers Protect Their Young
The basic riff in this song is based on a method of tuning the guitar. There is a certain position on the guitar where the same note rings in different octaves on different strings if you hold a certain chord position. Once I learned this tuning method, this song came out soon afterward.Ever hear of Greenpeace? Hopefully by the time you read this they made a difference on this planet!!! We supported them throughout our lives. Another song recorded with a sore throat!!!!
Canyon Runner- Acoustic intro
A riff that actually made me get out of bed one night to go down to the studio (that at the time was in our living room) to record it before I forgot it. (Supposedly this happens to songwriters a lot but this is the only time so far it happened to me). I worked up what was going to become a song until I started working on Drew’s song. This seemed like a perfect walk up to Drew’s song so instead, there it went.
Canyon Runner ( A song for Bonnie and Drew) – A story about my very close friend Drew was written in two pieces. First the riff above. The words were written during a bottle of wine at Bonnie and Drew’s home (20 Center Court, Laguna Niguel, California) while Drew was at the bagel store and Taf and Bon and the kids were at Disneyland during our visit in early 1995. I worked on recording it starting in January 1996 and it wasn’t finished until May 1997 the longest it had taken me by then to complete a song. It was a song of two major firsts, one being the first use of my Martin D-41 guitar, and, second the first use of digital recording in my studio, the new technology of which I was learning as I went along and which was the main reason it took so long to finish and why the song sounds very amateur production-wise. The electric guitar intro was recorded straight into the computer as were other pieces as I went along.
Our very close friends Drew and Bonnie and their kids, suddenly, to our great dismay, left to live in California in the summer of 1993. To our great happiness the “Canyon Runner” returned to live on Long Island in the summer of 1998 after the five years I came to call “The Dark Age”. “Red Flag the Track” relates to the obsession Drew and I have for Formula One and Indy Car racing which we travel the World to watch!!
Sister Golden Hair – An attempt to cover a favorite America song written by Gerry Beckley. Probably the last time I’ll record another persons song as time is limited (and I suck at it), (actually I suck in general at this, but I like to do it!) without a steel guitar I did the slide part on my Stratocaster with a steel slide. (Go listen to America, they are great!!).
Here we go, its reasonable from here on!?
Justin Visits Fernando’s House
This song began one afternoon in Puerto Rico (at El Conquistador) in the summer of 1995 on a vacation with Taf in which we got hit with a hurricane that then came across Long Island when we got home (hit twice by one storm!!). I built up the basic melody and enjoyed playing it periodically thereafter. In the spring of 1996, Justin and I traveled to Costa Rica to see the planting of the Teakwood plantation project I was working on with my good friend Oscar Sanabria. As we walked around the plantation (in Roxana, Costa Rica) in the heat I kept hearing the song. In the middle of the farm was a small house built for the foreman and care taker whose name was Fernando. The trip was very eventful as at one point we were actually followed by locals who eventually stole Oscar’s briefcase from right out of our car as we stood next to it, after slashing our tires to disable our car! The “boomerang briefcase” as we named it was found several hours later beside a street in San Jose, Costa Rica. The trip ended with an earthquake at the airport as we left for home!! Upon our arrival in Miami, customs inspectors asked if we had visited any farms during our stay, an affirmative answer to which would set off a much more thorough security check and delays.
So Justin and I looked at each other and decided no, we hadn’t gone to a farm, Justin had visited Fernando’s house!!! The music was completed to have the feel of our emotions during the trip. Check out the jungle birds at the start and ocean liner horns at the end of the song! It is the first song completely recorded digitally into the computer.
Thundering Horses
An attempt at a science fiction song with twelve string electric guitar!
Glaciers and Snowdrifts
In early 1999 I started to work around with alternate tunings on my guitars. Usually guitars are tuned the same way in “standard tuning”, but if you change to something else you get unique sounds. I tuned my Martin travel guitar to “double drop D tuning” (DADGBD) and took it with me to Banff on our annual ski trip with my brother Geoff, his wife Heidi and the cousins Jamie, Kerry, and Kristin. While we skied in Lake Louise I could not stop hearing the song in my head. In my spare time there, I finished the song and immediately after April 15th spent a day off at home to record it.
The Overture (to Tommy)
This needs no introduction. If you never heard the rock opera Tommy written by Pete Townshend and performed by The Who in 1969, stop reading this, drop what you are doing, go get your hands on it, and listen to it. In my humble opinion, in 2000, after 44 years of life, I think this is the most amazing music ever written on this planet (or maybe anywhere).This stuff by the 1990’s was hard to find in published written music form. I found it in a used record store and learned it and worked on it on and off for many years (starting on a summer trip to Skytop Pa. And Mohonk). Finally on a 20th anniversary vacation with Taf in mid November 1999, I recorded it at Little Dix Bay in Virgin Gorda in late 1999 on my notebook computer with my Ovation guitar in our room by the ocean.I then edited it the following week in Anguilla and then mixed it upon my return home. The notebook didn’t have the power of the studio computer and some static resulted, but I wasn’t about to do it over as it was born in the Caribbean on our trip!!!That trip was a lifetime highlight!!
The Fires Of Winter
In late 1997, on a plane ride to California on business with some time to kill, I decided to outline a suite of songs to someday become a song cycle, rock opera, Broadway show or the like (I have a big imagination). I chose to combine two of my favorite natural things – the fires we build in our fireplace and the changes in the seasons where we live that are so dramatic. Being a warm person by nature, I look forward to the cool autumn and cold winter months which are the times we enjoy the fires. By the time I landed I had the list that is here but no idea what was next.The biggest frustration I have with all this is that it takes so long to record songs and so little time to write them (I think write is a misnomer, I think make it up is more appropriate!!) Anyway, I have a lot of ideas, but so little time to actually complete anything. I actually keep detailed studio records that show I get to spend about 105 hours or so a year in the studio, but with maintenance and installing and debugging stuff, as well as just hanging out, the actual time spent producing the songs is maybe 60 hours a year at best!!
So, I decided after making the list here, that over time, little solo acoustic guitar riffs and melodies, themes and ideas that normally go unfinished, would be strung together and plugged in here, as a demo of what someday, when expanded could be a more finished work. That way I wouldn’t feel the frustration of not being able to finish anything, as it wasn’t supposed to be.
So over the next year or two, as ideas arrived, I wrote them down and molded them together into this. What we have here is the first 20 of these things that I dreamed up, filling the capacity of the Fires list. I tried to fit the mood of the sounds with the appropriate place in the seasons of the fires and section titles as best I could.
Certain of them I remember exactly where they appeared: Disbursing the Ashes arrived at a campsite in Muir Woods, Ca. after a long hike by myself with my backpacker guitar when I had a day to kill waiting for a plane home from another business trip. Storing the Screens came on a Cape Cod vacation with the Boys and Taf in November 1998. Sparks in the Draft – I had been working on the song Never Going Back by Fleetwood Mac with my guitar teacher and the techniques I learned gave rise to this song which is finger picked up and down the neck of the guitar .Originally just a riff from the Fires of Winter it turned into this complete song (with other instruments) before the Fires were done. As part of the Fires, I included this whole song since it was done. But for the most part, sitting around the house at night, enjoying the few minutes here and there between games, work and school events with my guitar, watching my precious boys grow up around me was when most of it showed up.
If I’d just mixed it end to end, the titles and sequence would be lost by the listener. So I decided to introduce the titles to keep track. But instead of hearing me, the title is niece Kimberly Drexler (my sister’s daughter) at age 6 and the tracks are introduced by Jake Giffuni (my son), age 8.
The plan now? Maybe someday, in retirement, write a story which is narrated around a wood pile and fireplace and accompanied by this music that becomes a play or a movie. Or maybe a descendant or someone else will write it. Who knows?
Three Boys and a Home
Originally a riff to be used as part of the Fires of Winter suite which soon evolved into a song of it’s own and actually became the conclusion of the Fires. The home by the way, noted above was moved into 9/1/83 by Chris, Kathy (Taf) and 2 week old Justin Eber Giffuni. Michael Benjamin Giffuni and Jake Matthew Giffuni showed up 6/10/85 and 3/5/91. (Hear Michael’s Dream and Welcome Jake!)
Stone Jam
I decided it was time to make up something that sounds like the Rolling Stones, (a 3 way tie with Poco and The Who for my favorite band). You do that by tuning the guitar in G, and making barre chords. Once I had the basic sound, I just jammed for a while and made this up. I forgot though that you need to keep vocals in mind when you write a song and after it got this far and was recorded like this I could not find a way to add words as it seemed too involved all ready. So it stands like this.
Cap Jaluca and Ocean Terrace
Both were written and recorded at Cap Jaluca, Anguilla on that mid-Novmber 1999 trip. Done on the notebook computer and edited all on that trip. Later mixed to my new CD burner in early 2000. I had intended to add words to Cap Jaluca, but decided to leave it in the form I left Anguilla with. It was our second trip to Anguilla, and 5 days after we left it was hit with a Category 5 hurricane that battered it for 72 straight hours. I hope we can go back someday.