Across The Tracks

Waiting for your connection at an isolated train station in the depths of winter is a wretched place to be. I know.

I do not drive so I have spent many hours and many more miles crisscrossing the country using the rail system. Its a funny state of limbo experienced when traveling by train, your neither here nor there. There is nothing romantic about modern rail travel. The empty platform and slowly dwindling daylight,the forlorn look down the tracks hoping to catch sight of the next inbound engine. Travel on a Sunday with work the next day and a monkey of a hangover hitching a ride on your shoulders is an altogether different kind of beast..a personal hell. I know. So save any whimsical notions of train travel for the stateside phenomenon of freight hopping and its world of folk songs and the footloose hobo.

A year ago my brother Andy happened to play me a tune he had come up with on his guitar…

The tempo and mood of this piece evoked the loneliness and transient nature of rail travel for me. At the time I was having a small ’sojourn’ away from my artwork due to some creative block, and so found myself playing around with music as another creative release. We recorded Andy in one take doing his thang on an electro-acoustic Martin D-15 (for those that are interested in such things.) I then took the raw recording into Logic and laid some very loose (read as sloppy) percussion over it. It has a real chugging feel to it and the snare hits remind me of a loco cracking over the sleepers of a track. Steam engine whistle samples and synth weirdness were thrown in for atmospherics.

You can hear the short track below which we titled ‘Her train never came in’. At some point I will post another track this time featuring my other brother Scott and one of the earliest songs he wrote from way back. For this one I decided to drop the guitar we recorded and just keep his vocals. Some brass and Lesley Organ were added for a nice retro feel….but that’s another day and another post……

Andy Maclaren – ‘Her train never came in’ – press play to listen