Hearbreak and alcohol.


STILL DRINKING

as soon as my heart stops hurting
when your memory stops hanging around
as soon as these tears stop falling
i'll set this bottle down
 
   but i'm still drinking
   still in this bar
   can't stop thinking
   that forgetting can't be far
   there must be a better way
   to drive you from my heart
   but i don't know
   i'm still drinking
   i'm still drinking

as soon as that jukebox stops playing
songs that make me wish you were still mine
as soon as i don't see your face each time i close my eyes
i'll stop trying to whiskey myself blind
 
   i'm still drinking
   still in this bar
   can't stop thinking
   that forgetting can't be far
   there must be a better way
   to drive you from my heart
   but i don't know
   i'm still drinking
   i'm still drinking
   i'm still drinking


The BAND:

Style is _FPBTSEV.STY (2 Ev FgerpickGuitars Slow [65RS])

RealTracks in style: ~~701:Bass, Electric, PopHalfNotesSync Ev 085
MIDI SuperTracks in song: 2066:Piano, Rhythm NewAgeAnswers Ev16 110
RealTracks in style: ~1676:Guitar, Acoustic, Fingerpicking CountryBrent Ev 065
RealTracks in style: ~364:Guitar, Acoustic, Fingerpicking Ev 065
RealTracks in song: ~368:Guitar, Acoustic, Strumming Ev 065
RealTracks in song: ~369:Pedal Steel, Background Ev 065


Thanks for listening.
Comments welcomed.
Have at it.

floyd

Nice! "I'll stop trying to whiskey myself blind", great line!

Loved how you brought in the pedal steel, very effective IMHO.

Just BEAUTIFUL!!! This is my kind of song-melancholy, emotional---the type that just plain "gets you". The 9th (I think) chords strike just the right mood. Pretty melody that just bleeds out slowly. I would LOVE to hear Linda Ronstadt sing this, although Floyd does a hell of a job with it. GREAT ONE Floyd!!! Take care. Greg

Such a pretty melody and arrangement with a beautifully engaging melancholy vocal to bring home the lyrics. Much enjoyed FJ.

Hi Floyd.

You had me reaching for the Kleenex before the first chorus was over.

I'm sure that if this was a release, there'd be more than enough broken-hearted people to send this rocketing to number one in the Country Chart.

A great song with a wonderfully heart-rending vocal delivery.

No one does it any better than this.

ROG.

Floyd,

Man, of all of the Holiday Drinking songs that have been posted on this forum in honor of the Christmas season, I think you have outdone us all.

When I heard this, I said to myself, Man, forget Santa Claus, I'm just gonna get wasted.

No seriously, Floyd, this another great, great heart-wrenching song dude.

Beautiful song Floyd. Awesome vocal and lyric

Floyd

Nice effective backing sung beautifully. Very evocative, melancholy and engaging.
An excellent piece of songwriting.

Peter

Floyd

Beautiful acoustic song and yea well done on the vocals.

To be honest I'm still trying and working to get good acoustic sounds like this for a song I wrote.

Onwards and upwards


+1

Thanks

Floyd,

A really fine vocal performance - one of your best.
Like Greg I enjoy getting drawn into the emotional depths on a song like this and you`ve carried it through from the first line.
Fantastic guitar accompaniment and production.

Robert

Floyd,

Beautiful song, like only you can do ;-) You always manage to make such a very professional use of the realtracks. Top-notch vocals.
I do detect a very small glitch in the first two seconds of the intro, something in the guitar realtrack rendering?

Rob

Glitch ?????.....

Fantastic production and the vocals...wow, Floyd... just fantastic. It's a showcase to me for proper use of reverb on vocals... and you are so tender... great turn-arounds and moving into maj7s.... really sweet...

Hi Jane Floyd, Nice guitars in this! Very melancholy and introspective. Keep up the great work

Hello, floyed

Very beautiful melody accompanied with a quiet band.
Melancholic feelings reached my heart deeply.
I also love this genre of your music as well as your uplifting music.
I will drink Bourbon tonight instead of Scotch.
Enjoyed my listen a lot.

Best Regards.

Shigeki Adachi

Floyd,

A somber and melancholy song with heartfelt lyrics.
Production is the usual top drawer and I love the "James Taylor"'esque vocal.

It's the first time I've heard Whiskey used as a verb!

Excellent work,
Jez

Good job on the writing.

I like the slow sad melancholy feel to this.

Observations: I really liked the feel of the backing tracks on the first verse. Piano and fingerpicking guitars.... When the steel came in, it was almost an unwelcome addition and was more of a distraction to me. But that's a personal preference.

Great song and a good job on it.

love it, love it, love it!

Thanks, Dave... appreciate that...




LOL. I would love to hear Linda do this, too!!! A shame that she has lost the ability to sing - a true loss for the world... Thanks for the great review!...

This tells the story so nicely. I like the pace as well, it's very controlled, a hard thing to do (for me anyways) at that tempo.

The singing is very pleading and fits into the song so well.

Very nice production.

Wow what an Awesome Autobiographical Story Tell.....errr I hope it ain't. Lol Who don't love a good sad drinking song? Love Your Work!

Tommy

Floyd, your such a great song writer! You did a beautiful job on this tune. You conveyed raw emotion in the vocal (to my ears anyway) which many folks will be able to relate to. I like the sans drums approach to this one. It's exactly what it needed. Take care, Torrey

Appreciate you dropping by for a listen, Josie...




ROG - thanks for those wonderful thoughts! Now I'm singing "You make a grown man cryyyyyy... you make a grown man cryyyyyy..."

Man, you been hangin out at my pub? Everybody's cryin' in their beer down there!

Love this one fj.


Regards,

Bob

Another beautiful song, Floyd. I especially love the melody and interesting chord progression on this one.

More musical genius Floyd

What a great tempo, what a great delivery, what great lyrics.

When I read the lyrics, I never expected this style or tempo was going to deliver those words.

Another hit.

Beautiful! Well done in every way. Really enjoyed it. Keep 'em coming.

Bob

floyd,

Sadly been there and thought at the time the words that you so eloquently write in this song.

Sad and poignant song
Wonderful with such heart-felt vocals
Nice ending

Have a good Christmas

All the best

Alyn

Barkeep! Another! ... and pour one for my friend here...




Thanks, Scott...




Appreciate that, Peter...

Great one. I love the melody, the chord choices.
Your vocal sounds so natural and good, this song is a good example of why I'm a big fan of your music.

Kenny

Floyd,

My friend told to me to tell you that he did offer you a drink but you turned him down--at Christmas!!!!!



Just sayin' man.

When I was in college and immersed in blues and psychedelic rock I would occasionally frequent a small county line bar...cinder block building with a jukebox. There I first really "listened" to country songs particularly of the tears in your beer variety. It was the mid 60's and the patrons played certain sad songs over and over - not to dance to but as I thought at the time to help purge mountains of hurt.

This song immediately took me to that place and people who "can't stop thinking that forgetting can't be far."

The interplay of the backing tracks and your vocal with the melody and lyric build a powerful tension between hope and despair that never lets go.

The vocal is rich and nuanced and for Janice it brought up images of a Sinatra song - one of those with him sitting at a table...shot glass in hand. If a song can conjure up images ranging from my bar to Janice's then I think you've well covered the bases.

Oh, and then there's the signature big studio production sound that is becoming easy to take for granted.

Outstanding.

J&B

Simply lovely! The piano and acoustic sound great and are very effective. I liked the sound of the bass. Did you use any plug ins on it. The volume is perfect. This is songwriting at it's best and delivered with just the right of amount of emotion to get that longing, lonely, passing time, getting over it feeling. The production is again stellar. Merry Christmas to you brother. Tom

Simply one of your best. Stellar at every level. I think that PGMusic creating piano supermidis opened a whole new generation of great Floyd Jane writes.

Your talent is multi grammy worthy and it's the world's loss that you aren't a household name.

My late brother always tried to encourage me to keep writing because, as he said, "you only have to get it right once!"

You get it right every time.

Charlie

At the risk of rubber stamping all the same things I always want to say about the high quality of your mixes, the unique signature sound of your voice, and your certified word-smithing abilities... all of which are certainly applicable here... the thing that stands out to me about this song is how well the instruments handle the interesting chords. Not just individually, but how well the opening guitar and piano accent the right notes without getting in one another's way.

You really USE the power that BIAB provides, and the end result is so seamless, its impossible to tell what part of the excellence comes from the technology and what part comes from your long list of good selection decisions and editing skills.

But one thing's for sure: your 100% success rate proves that you aren't throwing spaghetti against the wall like most of us... you know what works, and you have an uncanny ability to rearrange that knowledge over and over again into songs that would certainly be hits if you had the sponsorship required to make it happen.

Thanks, Colly. It is not hard to get good clean acoustic guitar sounds out of BIAB. I generally treat them all the same - in this case, a Brent RT that starts the song, then the standard fingerpick takes over after a couple of measure and the strum gets added in to provide the texture I wanted. They are all exported out of BIAB dry, centered and at full volume. Then in my DAW (Studio One) I add just an EQ. Using that, everything below 100 is dropped. That helps keep the low end from getting muddy. Then I add a small bump around 500 - maybe 2 dB - and a shelf on the high side above 2kHz - a couple of dB... That makes the acoustics crisper and they cut through the mix nicely. If you solo them, they might seem a little thin - but in the mix, they do what they need to do...

Robert - thanks for having a listen. Glad you liked it...




Thanks, Rob. Appreciate that. The small click at the start is Brent's fault - it is string noise - soloing it, it actually sounds like a nail striking a string. I like leaving those kind of subtle sounds in the recording... makes it "real", I think...


- see above...

Thanks, Andy... Realy appreciate that...




Joe - appreciate you stopping by for a listen..




Shigeki Adachi - Thanks for your continued support...

Great song Floyd... So well sung and delivered.

Bob

Absolutely beautiful, Floyd. "I'll stop trying to whiskey myself blind" is a great line -- delivered with the perfect amount of wry humour to make it really shine. You've outdone yourself with this vocal. Great job!

Thanks, Jez! Appreciate that. Whiskey IS a verb, yes!




Thanks, Herb. I appreciate your thoughts on the steel - I always go back to check the things that you "make note of", but we'll have to agree to disagree on this one - I am quite pleased at how the steel is woven into the fabric of the production.




Dan - it is SO nice to see you over here on the dark side! This is one of my favorite reviews!

Hi Floyd. My goodness I wish I could do what you do.
Such high quality and so consistent.
Lovely melancholy song here.
Will use your tip on the guitar eq'ing next time. Cheers.

FJ for your music I will visit the darkside anytime. And regarding my cryptic review, I long ago showered you with praises on your song writing and vocal talents. I remember day 1 when you posted your first offering and my comments at the time were "Man Oh Man, what are you going here...?" Over the years you have been the recipient of my highest accolades, I got no more words except "love it, love it, love it" -

But if more words are needed, than a picture is worth a 1000 of them..

Thanks, Mike. Appreciate that...




- 'hic'

Merry Christmas, Tommy...




Torrey - I really appreciate that....

floyd,

The first thing that I was struck by when ‘Still Drinking’ started playing was the production quality of the instruments. It’s fantastic. The overall sound has a clarity and spaciousness that makes it sound like it’s come straight from the mixing desk of somewhere like Beaird Music. Then your vocals arrived and, if it’s at all possible, the production polish sparkled even more. I don’t know what you’ve done but the end result that I’m hearing through my headphones right now is 100% quality, through and through.

I love this arrangement. The sonic texture you’ve created by using the slightly unresolved sound of extended chords showcases the melancholy of the lyrics perfectly. To my mind, this is a perfect example of how to use prosody in the most sophisticated way possible.

As with so many of your songs, after I had finished listening, I ended up being inspired by yet another journey of lyric discovery. In this instance, it was your use of the word ‘whiskey’, and how you cleverly made a new verb out of an existing noun, that set me off on the journey. If you’re interested, read on! If not, it’s probably best to stop here

The journey…

One of the things that I’ve noted over the years is that many of yesterday’s lyricists fearlessly invent words and expressions to suit their need. Such literary inventions are called neologisms. Your ‘Still Drinking’ expression of “...to whiskey myself blind” is such a neologism.

As I thought more about where I’d heard invented words, William Shakespeare, Ira Gershwin and Cole Porter sprang to mind. So, using Google, I searched using “words invented by shakespeare” as my query. This led me to the below site.

• http://shakespeare-online.com/biography/wordsinvented.html

At the top of the above webpage, the introduction read,


Hmmmm.... it seems that you are in excellent company with "to whiskey"!

Next I unleashed Google to find some lyrics of Cole Porter. That was when I came across,


I smiled when I read the above for two reasons: one, the cleverness of using the made-up word ‘tin-pan-tithesis’ for ‘antithesis’; two, the brilliance with which he has set up the meaning of his newly invented word ‘de-lovely’. By pre-empting his use of ‘de-’ as a prefix, Porter has given 'de-lovely' a meaning that's associated with both ‘delightful’ and ‘delicious’. How skilful is that! In this sense, Porter has taken ‘de-’ the prefix into brand new unchartered territory.

In 'Still Drinking', you've set up the meaning of "to whiskey" equally well so that when we, the listener, hear it, it sounds perfectly natural, like a word that already exists, and its meaning is fully understood. Outstanding stuff!

Then, as is often the way with coincidence, the day after I started thinking about your “to whiskey” neologism, while I was driving to work, Stevie Wonder started singing on the radio… ♫♫yesterme, yesteryou, yesterday♫♫. When I returned home, I immediately set Youtube into action and found...

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWD9mfLW9xY

A little further research uncovered that this song was written by Ron Miller and Bryan Wells in 1969.

What amazed me about these lyrics is that when I looked them up on the internet, by the end of the song, the following six words had been invented…

• yesterme, yesteryou, yesterglow, yesterfools, yesterdreams, yesterlove

Moreover, every one of these words made perfect sense within the context of the lyrics. The way that Miller and Wells have created these words and have then driven their meaning by relating them all to “yesterday”, in addition to using the perspective of past tense, is formidable. Even though I’ve heard Stevie Wonder sing this song hundreds of times over the years, I have never once fully appreciated the lyric-writing skill on show.

So, at the end of the beginning of this journey, I want to say, Thank you. Once again you've inspired me to take a road that I would never have discovered on my own. Next time I write some lyrics, I'm going to see if I can create some new words!

May Christmas bring lots of good tidings your way,
Noël

Hi Floyd,

Love the beginning of each verse ... that musical hold as the verse progressed. Another wonderful creation and performance by you ...you never disappoint ... ever. Simply wonderful!

Merry Christmas and hoping for a fabulous 2017 for you & yours.

Alan & Di

Home away from home...





Thanks, Curt...




Appreciate that, Trevor! Always pleased to see you drop by...





Thanks, Bob...

Thanks, Alyn. Merry Christams to you!




Appreciate that, Kenny. I'm a big fan of yours, as well.....

- depends on how it hits me at the time... you know that...




Well... kind of what I was trying for... "Country Sinatra"... I considered doing a video - all focused on a pair of hands on a bar, a glass in one and a cigarette in the other, taking turns moving up ou t of the picture...





Always appreciate hearing what you have to say, Tom. Thanks! I increased the bass in this one because of your comment (and Josie's) on the last one - so thanks for that, too. There is an EQ that drops out the low end below 80 (to clear mud), and a slight bump at 200 to give a little definition, followed by a little bit of compression...

Charlie - have to tell you... you really floored me with that one. Took my breath away... I sincerely thank you...

Pat - your reviews are always so thoughtful and thought-filled. One of the greatest things about BIAB is that ANYONE can produce great results. A little thought about where things land will add your own flavor to what happens. This MIDI Supertrack piano is one I use all the time - and sing it's praises - I'm surprised that no one else uses it in this manner - and it sounds different with every song... Thanks for your support - and this wonderful review...

Thanks, Bob!




Will - appreciate you stopping by!




Richard - good to see you around... you do consistent and quality yourself...




I remember those days....

Always so good Floyd ! This kind of sad song must be extremely well sung to hold a real interest, and it is undoubtedly. Accompaniment at the same level.

Cheers
Pascal

What an incredible review, Noel!...and then some... a mention of Beaird Music is, indeed, nice... I was there once to observe a session, but never had any songs of my own done there. That area of Nashville has about a dozen top studios. I had a number of songs done at County Q which is a few blocks away. They were all "as good as it gets"... (but... one song will cost you more than a one-time purchase of BIAB - which then gives you those musicians at your leisure for the rest of your life!!)

A delightful journey you take us on... a little whiskey is always good to grease the wheels... have to say, I like having a discussion that includes one of my songs also include Shakespeare, Gershwin, Porter, and Stevie Wonder!! What a great word "tin-pan-tithesis" is!! It is always good to be reminded of how incredible Little Stevie was (is).

Thank you, so much, for a wonderful review and insightful songwriting discussion...

Alan & Di - Thanks, y'all! Great to see you around again...




Pascal - I appreciate that - thanks for stopping in...

Great song Floyd. Nice listening.

Sergio