Hey kids!
It’s the penultimate entry in the saga that is “The Stories Behind Love Bites.”
Today’s Adventure: The Cough (where a little blood comes out)
[stream it here]
I first started putting this song together before the Love Bites concept had come to form. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with such a sad sounding song. But it’s existence is what helped me devise the story of Love Bites, the tragedy portion of the romance.
But who cares about all that crap, right? You just want to hear how I got that killer saxophone, don’t you?
OK, FINE! You can be so rude sometimes…
No joke, this song had NO sax in it until 2 days before I sent the track off for Mastering. It was completely last minute, and a huge surprise to me. Let me tell you how that came about.
Way back in June of 2016, I noticed on Instagram that a touring sax player, Chris J Hampton, was liking some of my stuff. So I went out on a limb and asked him if he’d be interested in doing some sax work on one of my songs. He was super receptive, so I sent him off an early version of The Cough (Back then with the temporary title of “Sad Pop”). Then, I didn’t hear back from him. I had to assume he didn’t dig the song, and couldn’t find a good way to let me down. Stalking him on Instagram I saw he was touring again, so even if he did like it, he didn’t likely have the time.
So time goes on, I let it go, continue on as normal. Five months pass, I’m wrapping up the mixes for Love Bites, and early one Sunday morning I get an email. It’s Chris, and he’s sent me a bunch of tracks full of his gorgeous sax playing. This is literally two days before I was going to send the final mixes off to my Mastering Engineer. (Gustav Brown, I highly recommend him.) Couldn’t have been more of a surprise.
These kinds of happy accidents seem to be piling up as time goes on. It’s been such a wonderful journey, pulling all this off. There’s plenty of stress (mostly self-induced) but it’s all made worth it with things like these happening, and people like yourself showing your support. I can’t thank you enough.
Ugh, sorry, I got all mushy again. Maybe it’s just this sad song making me tear up?
It may also be worth mentioning, in case you don’t understand the title of this song, it’s a reference to the film trope of the “Incurable Cough of Death“. When you see a character cough into a tissue, and, mysteriously, there’s blood. It’s as cliche as it gets, and I thought it was a wonderful way to mark the “turn” in tone of Love Bites. Sorry if you’re now stuck in the rabbit hole that is TVTropes.
Keep being so very awesome,
Vlad, your Vampire Step-Dad
