Sugar on the Snow

Sugar on the Snow

It all started with my college girlfriend’s crappy car.

Just like every car she had ever owned, someone had given it to her, and it was worth every penny.

One evening I borrowed her car and a snow plow backed into me. No one had told me that the '78 Ford Fairmont's horn was sounded by pressing in of the turn signal.

I know, insane right?

So the plow back into me and took out part of the grill and bend the headlight in such a way that, afterwards when driving at night it shown up into the trees as we drove along.

The damage to my girlfriend's car annoyed her. I argued my innocence due to the faulty design of the horn and the careless plow driver but it fell on deaf ears.

I was banned.

Since no one had given me a crappy car I had to get a ride from her to go to work at the local hospital. We were fighting about the car the whole way in.

I didn’t say goodbye when I arrived, I just closed the door and walked inside. It was one of those fights where you leave mad and cling to it like it was something precious. I was mad and I wanted to stay mad. How else would she know that I was totally right.

At the end of the day I was still mad at my girlfriend. I'd rather walk home three miles in the freezing cold than ask her for a ride I knew she didn't want to give me. It was the perfect way to feel sorry for myself so I did it with relish.

My trek took me along the North shore of the long and narrow Canandaigua lake. I looked out across the frozen water to the spot where the lakeside home we rented. I didn't see ice, I didn't see potential danger. I saw a shortcut. It would shave a half mile off, easy.

I noted the thickness of the ice and tested it with a few good stomps.

Solid.

Not only was it a good shortcut, the unusual scenery from the frozen lake set my creative juices flowing. I imagined that I was somewhere in the far north all alone and trudging across the tundra. A trapper or a maybe a prospector. All sorts of stories filled my head.

As I got further from the shore, about 300 meters, there was a sound that instantly pulled me back to reality. It was a deep moaning sound akin to distant thunder except that it was coming from somewhere beneath me. Under the ice!

Uh oh!

I had walked several hundred yards from shore at a diagonal heading straight for the house on the other side. I looked down and noticed that the ice had gradually gone from a frosty white to a dark green. That was free flowing lake water I was looking at just a few inches beneath my feet. I looked forward and noticed there were cracks not far from me with puddles of water in some of them.

Yikes!

Semi-frozen Canandaigua lake 

where I took my little stroll

I very gently turned around and tip-toed straight towards the shore. I kept walking on the ice close to shore where it was thick.

Once safe, my imagination, with the boost of adrenaline, added to the story of the prospector in Alaska, or somewhere similar. Like my girlfriend and I, he had had a big fight with his wife before making the long trek to town for supplies. Probably dried meat, coffee, and if there was any money left over, a sack of sugar. He leaves angry and holds on to it all day long.

His wife, worried about his delay getting home ventures out to meet him. She saves him and their quarrel became insignificant by comparison.

When I arrived home I apologized for damaging my girlfriend's car. I was rather happy simply to be warm, dry and alive!

Three years and two girlfriends later, I started writing a song called Marine for the latest girlfriend, but she broke up with me before I could finish it.

Thank God. It could have been a good song wasted. That tune became the main motif for "Sugar on the Snow".

I have an acoustic nylon string guitar that belonged to my grandmother and then my mom. It was likely my great grandmother's first as it is made by the "Bay State parlor guitar, a small bodied nylon string guitar made for after dinner concerts and sing-alongs for those families who couldn’t afford pianos.

I had figured it was made in the 1920s until I researched the manufacturer and learned they stopped making guitars in 1898.

Harvey, by far the oldest thing I own

Holy smokes!

I have so few guitar songs or even ideas that “Marine,” I had written for my girlfriend while at ARC, was the first that came to mind.

But what would the song be about?

Like a flash, God zapped me with an idea: I thought of the story I made up while walking on the ice all those years ago. With a few alterations to the story and a additional part in the music, I had my song:

Click listen to the song as you read on.

Listen

Sugar on the Snow

©2008 Joel T Johnson

Walking across the frozen lake

Is two hours less to the company store

His harsh words echo as he trudges

And so the slamming of the cabin door

The cold it touches his toes like needles

Through his beaver skin shoes

And freezes an angry tear;

How could she force him

To choose

Halfway across the lake

He could hear that spring ice groan

“I best be taking the long and dry road

On my way back home”

The darkness it changes her spite to worry

And her heart begins to ache

She lights up a whale oil lantern

And sets out on foot

Across the lake

He’s fit to say a thing or two

When he returns home to their shack

Then he sees her footprints out on the lake

To meet him coming back

He runs towards what he hopes he sees

A distant lantern’s glow

His sack of sugar fell to the ground

And spilled out on the snow

Sugar on the snow

He cried her name when he saw shards

Of ice floating around his bride

She was pale she was blue

She was barely clinging

To the frozen side
Clinging to life

He crawled slowly on his belly

Till he could safely pull her clear

He carried her home whispering

Sweetly in her ear

Her teeth chattered from inside her quilt

Wet clothes hung on a wire

He held her close, their unkind words

burned with the wood

In the fire

Sugar on the snow

The title is an image that more or less popped in my head. I liked the visual of white sugar pouring out on the white snow. In all accuracy I realize that sugar would have actually been a golden brownish color in the late 1800's. More important is the concept that his sack of sugar, a very valuable commodity back then and something he had spent the whole day walking to town and back to get, became completely insignificant the moment he realized his wife could be in danger. He drops it to the ground as he also drops his anger about their fight.

Something I realized about these lyrics just during the writing of this blog is that they are written in present tense until the mention of the sugar. From that point on they are written in past tense. It’s not something that meant to do consciously, I just wrote what felt right and flowed as it needed to. The better things I’ve written have always been more my stepping out of the way than having my way with the pen.

Uh oh it’s the…

Tech Section

Techies read on, you normal folks can go off and support me by buying my album.

Recording the song

This song is one of three songs on my CD that contains any guitar at all and the only one that features guitar part as the core of the arrangement.

I started out with my grandmother’s guitar. I played it with only my fingers using two large diaphragm condenser mics: one close, one in the room. It was nearly impossible for this instrument not to sound good. Keeping the old girl in tune and playing in tune from one chord to the next was my biggest challenge

Bass

For this song the bass guitar was played recorded in a more typical fashion instead of the elaborate multi amp set up I use for some of my tunes: A mic in front of the bass amp and a second track recorded through a DI box. The direct box was more a safety track than a crucial component in the sound.

Rode condenser

Slide Guitar

‘Sugar’ is a ballad but I wanted to prevent it from sounding sappy. Electric guitar played with a slide with some ballsy distortion gave the song just the right amount of teeth.

I’m not a real guitar player by any means so it took a lot of work and a few takes to get any sounding guitar tracks. This went double for the slide.

For the slide guitar I used a Kramer Strat copy that sounds great but doesn’t play that well or that in-tune. Bottle neck slide playing originated from delta blues players who could only afford guitars so cheap that they could barely be played on the frets at all. They circumvented this by using a bottle neck for a slide.

I plugged the output of the Peavey tube amp into one of my bass cabinets, 

not for sound but to create a quasi dummy load so 

the amp would scream at a more manageable volume

That’s kinda how it worked with me too. I used a thick glass slide and put the guitar through my my ART distortion/effects unit and from there into the Peavey Delta Blues tube amp with a close Sure 57 mic on the amp and a Rode condenser in the room.

Steel string acoustic guitar

I actually purchased a steel string acoustic guitar for this song. I needed something to be able to perform it and Grandma's guitar ain't leaving the house. I didn't mean to use it on the recording originally. Eventually I found it handy to add depth to the nylon guitar part and help it cut through the mix as the song and the story behind it got more intense. Early in the song I used finger picking in unison with the nylon string then I used a relatively hard pick at pinnacle moments in the song.

Monica, a Breedlove AC25 I got for a ridiculous sale price

Strings

At first, I programmed sampled (fake) strings. Then I brought in a very small string section—that’s right, right in my living room—and recorded many takes over and over of them playing the same parts as the sampled strings. I mixed just enough of the fake strings in the background to make the real ones sound larger and more full.

I will go into this process in more detail in a later blog. <o I won't

Especially near the end, the arrangement gets quite full and I had to mix carefully to prevent a loss of clarity. Right before the end, between the guitars, real strings, fake strings, doubled vocals and many backing vocals, there are some forty tracks playing at once. I gradually lowered levels on existing tracks to make way for newer entrances and used light equalization to create spectral ‘slots’ for each part to occupy in the frequency spectrum.

There is also a stereo reverb trick that help maintain clarity and a full lush mix at the same time. This trick was imparted to me by an audio engineer friend of mine and I will cover that in a later blog as well. <<Never gonna happen