"Vampires" is part of a free song give away and was release on the bands site in 2015 as part of a exclusive free song sign up. If you signed up for the bands mailing list then you are entitled to a free download of the song.
Over the next what I imagine will be the next few months, the band will be opening their song vault and be releasing unreleased songs, demos and B-sides. Sign up now at www.Ourladypeace.com for free and get your chance to download some of these songs. A description of the song as written by Raine follows bellow.
“Vampires” came about during the making of the Healthy In Paranoid Times record.
We wrote so many songs for that record that I can’t remember where the seed of it came from, but I do remember working on it and recording it.
While portions of that record were done in Maui, Hawaii--where Bob Rock lived and had his studio--and also Toronto, Vampires, from what I recall, was a complete Los Angeles experience. We were writing/rehearsing in an interesting spot called Clown in Santa Monica. The place was decked out with creepy clowns everywhere, had a Tecate beer vending machine, and a shuffleboard table which helped provide some good breaks from all the hours in a small room together.
I remember the guitar lick for this song being played in a less aggressive fashion until someone came up with the idea to beef it up and play it the way that you hear it now. That took the song overall into more aggressive territory.The moving, ascending chords in the pre-chorus (“You want blood….”) was something I threw out there during the writing in an effort to get something going on guitar. This was during a period when I was struggling to find my creative voice in the band, and was always looking anywhere I could to make something more interesting on guitar. I was happy when that part made the cut.
The song was recorded at The Village Recorder, a place just dripping with history and vibe in West Los Angeles. The studio is in an old Masonic Temple, so not your traditional studio structure layout. Fleetwood Mac once had a studio blocked out in there for over a year I believe, while making their record Tusk. A list of artists and records done there would possibly break the internet so I’m not even gonna try here….And while I love The Village, the room that we were in was not the coziest. The way that it was laid out made it basically feel like a hallway. During basic tracking, my guitar amp was even in the bathroom of the lounge, as there was so little space.
One random side note of this session, and possibly while recording guitars for this song, was when Bryan Adams stopped by to say hi to Bob. One of the first records I ever owned was Reckless and one of the first songs I learned to play on guitar was Summer of ’69. And there he was sitting on the floor a few feet away from me (tight quarters, as I said) as we were tracking guitars. It was a trip.
We were so up on this song at one point that we were going to call the album Vampire in the Sun. I remember Raine in that studio even drafting up a running order (sequence) of the songs on a dry-erase board in front of the mixing console, and us discussing what the cover artwork of the album could be. The song had an alternate version that featured the pre-chorus section broken down and soft with Raine singing the “If you want blood….” in falsetto, instead of the big bombastic way that you hear it here.
Attempts to find this Alt version for you all proved fruitless, sorry. If we do happen to come across it sometime in the future, we will be sure to throw it your way. One guitar geek moment on the recording comes to mind-during the bridge where it breaks down, there is one guitar doing fast picking of the chords, but if you listen close there is another one plucking a part along with it that kind of sounds like a Caribbean steel drum. It was the idea of Bob’s assistant Eric Helmkamp to weave a guitar string through the strings of my guitar near the bridge, which mutes, or muffles, the strings in a cool, metallic sort of way. It reminds me a little of The Police, the way that guitar part sounds. The ways to get interesting sounds out of a guitar never cease.
In the end, Healthy In Paranoid Times ended up being a less heavy record and we felt that while we really loved this song, it just didn’t fit the vibe of the rest of the record anymore.
We’re happy and excited to get the opportunity to share it with you now.
Enjoy.
-Steve
Download link: www.transparenthumans.com/vaul...