The Last Of The Wild Horses

This was the first song I managed to complete in BIAB and be happy with. (I posted the second, "Murder Hornets!!" a few months ago.) My collaborator Marty and I wrote it as part of February Album Writing Month 2021; it's just taken me this long to post it.

The song was created using the style _POPOMED with a banjo soloist track added. I assembled it in BIAB, then moved it over to RealBand for mixing and production. The vocals were recorded using Audacity because (insert long technical explanation here) using about 5% reverb, then imported back into RealBand for the final mix.

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Style is _POPOMED.sty with modifications:

Bass: 420:Bass, Electric, Blues Sw 120 (*)
Keyboard: 2046:Piano, Acoustic, Solo-Accompaniment CountryPopJohn Ev 120 (*)
Guitar 1: ~405:Guitar, Acoustic, Strumming Ev 120
Guitar 2: ~543:Guitar, Electric, Rhythm Dreamy Ev 120
Soloist: ~433:Banjo, Bluegrass Ev 130 (Soloist) (**)
Drums: NashvilleEven8^8-a:Snare, HiHat Open , b:Snare, Ride

(*) Replacement for instrument in style
(**) Added to style

Vocals recorded in Audacity with about 5% reverb

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THE LAST OF THE WILD HORSES
Words by R. B. Martin Clarke and Creede Lambard
Music by Creede Lambard
(c)2021 R. B. Martin Clarke & Creede Lambard

Strong and free and feral
Wild horses on the run
They're free from rein and harness
Or the weight of anyone.
A stallion black as midnight
Leads them up and down the rise
His soul burns like the sun
Beneath the prairie skies
And the twinkle of the stars is in his eyes

CHORUS
The last of the wild horses,
Pursuing freedom’s call,
Run proud untamed and brave
Across the chaparral.

They gallop to a canyon
They slow and then they pause
For rest and grass and water
They hear the raven's caws
It sends out the alarm
When danger comes their way
Time for the decision
Do they flee or do they stay —
Which one keeps them free for one more day?

CHORUS
The last of the wild horses,
Pursuing freedom’s call,
Run proud untamed and brave
Across the chaparral.

Once they took for granted
They always would be free
They took it as their due
A birthright legacy
Then bit by bit it disappeared
So slow it's hard to see
But still they run untamed
It's the only way they know to be

A foal is born on shaking legs.
He finds the standing hard.
He hears the raven's caw,
Sees the stallion standing guard
His journey is a story
That he’s just begun to write
Soon he’ll learn that freedom
Takes both flight and fight
And only he can know which one is right

CHORUS
The last of the wild horses,
Pursuing freedom’s call,
Run proud untamed and brave
Across the chaparral.

Congrats on the first one you're happy with.
It's a happy song.

Sounds like cross between "Ghost Riders In the Sky" & " Gilligan's Island Theme Song"

moto

Well put together Tuneslayer.
Thanks for posting. Rob4580

Loved the banjo. Super vocal and lyric. Well done. Good to hear from you.

Hi Tuneslayer,

I enjoyed your tune! You did an excellent job with it! What a great selection of instrumentation especially that piano in the right side of the mix and that bass really carries the song along! Great job on the vocals also! Thanks, Torrey

Nice song & production.
The vocals sound a little separate from the backing - probably because of the Audacity reverb. Using a common reverb will, often & along with some gentle compression, "glue" parts of a mix into a whole.
The bass does kick things along well with the drums but it weirds me out a little being over on the side.
On the narrative side I don't really think wild horses would do a lot of running in a chaparral but the words are evocative.
Good job.

Thank you all for listening and commenting! I'm still pretty new to music production, and I use comments and critiques as both encouragement to keep working at it and as a stepping stone toward improvement.



Stands to reason. Those two songs are part of the soundtrack of my childhood, and I've always maintained that what goes in through the ears eventually comes out through the voice and fingers.



Interesting, I don't think I mucked about with the L-R controls at all, which would mean the song's style puts the bass toward the side. I'll have to go look now that you mentioed it. My preference would definitely be to have the bass, drums and vocals on the center channel, and the other instruments to the ssidez.



Yeah. I didn't think to add the reverb after I combined the tracks. I'll have to play with reverb/compression as I experiment with DAWs.

Thanks again!

Fantastic.

I'm assuming that you played the banjo, right? If so you did a great job, i.e. a fantastic picker!

Super vocal and lyrics. You mix was spot on also.

Two thumbs up.

I wish I could play like that! No, the banjo track was generated by BIAB and I liked it well enough to "promote" it.

Thanks!