At the weekend, I went through a pile of old CDs looking for more songs to retreive for my 4-CD boxset. Again, I am trying to put together a CD of vocal songs and to save time writing new material, I am revisiting old stuff and attempting to breathe new life into it.
One song I wanted to use is called “Save Me” and so I went back to my master CD-R, but alas, laser rot or something caused the disc to be unreadable. I then spent most of Sunday afternoon looking for a solution to retrieve the seemingly lost data, before coming across BadCopyPro, a data retrieval suite. A few minutes with this and I successfully brought back the lost masters with the click of a mouse. What a relief. With the masters back from the dead, I listened to the track and decided to just remix the backing track and re-record the vocals. It works a bit better than the old version and I even did some slight editing on the end of the track to make things fit together better. A second song from the same sessions in 1999 called “You’re Going Down” was also saved, but I don’t think I’ll be re-using this. It wasn’t very good then and it sounds even worse now, even if I did decide to intervene and re-record some parts. Anyway, here is a rough mix of the new “Save Me” track:
Direct download: CLICK HERE
Back in 1999, I did a little CD called “Save Me”. Those were the good old days of www.mp3.com – a website where you could quickly and easily upload your songs and create purchasable CDs with the minimum of effort. We had great fun creating the artwork for that CD as it featured myself in the Missus’s old Vauxhall Nova, running myself over. Some clever trickery in PhotoShop made it all work, but I had to suffer for my art and lay on the cold road for 10 minutes while The Missus took the photographs. Those were the days! Unfortunately, a lot of the original artwork got lost when the backup CD-R went a bit manky and all that’s left is this front cover picture:
Who are those hairy fellows?
In the post: Robert Fripp – Exposure 30th Anniversary Edition. I know, I know. I already have the Japanese edition, but there is a story involved in all this. I had ordered the Japanese edition ages ago – I think it was January/February time and subsequently my credit card was cloned and I thought that my Internet order would not get processed as the card I had used was no longer valid. So in the meantime, I ordered the cheaper EU version from HMV using a voucher I had collected. The Japanese version turned up (my new credit card had been charged) and it was too late to cancel my HMV order as it had been on Special Order. So now I have two copies. Well that’s my story and I am sticking to it. I am sure Sid is having a good chuckle and waggling his finger at the screen at this record collecting shenanigans. Anyways, if you are planning to buy the CD, buy the Japanese version because the packaging is far superior. The EU version is nice, but they just know how to pull the stops out in Japan.