Coming home (the making of)

This is an idea I had for a while but could not find time to work further on it. The melodic line is complete but I struggle with finding the right sound.

For the curious, some of the older attempts:
Apr 2012: 1st version - for reasons I do not remember this version is haunted - most probably by my frustration of not being able to get the song out of my head. When I first started - I thought this will be a walk in the park, well, maybe a long walk but still something where I will be able to progress. A few days later after recording this, I found myself without any ideas that could get me closer to what I wanted. Where next? When this happens, I stop and move to something else. Then days, sometimes weeks later, while doing things unrelated, out of nowhere I get a spark followed right away by an idea starting to form. A lot of these times the spark proves to lead nowhere but other times it turns out to start an avalanche of ideas.



The 2nd version adds at 1:05 a first attempt to use the voice of Vaska Jankovska singing a fragment from one of the greatest songs I've heard - Pjesma from the album The time of Gypsies(Dom za vesanje)/Kuduz by Goran Bregovic.



What I love about this song, other than Vaska's beautiful voice is the undefined sound of the words, getting you to feel them, rather than hearing them. These is one of those rare cases where the previous version (Dona Dumitru Siminica : Cine are fata mare) is transformed way beyond its expected potential (yes, I know. Personal preference).



The 3rd version adds an intro and an ending and some more in the middle, and at this point the melodic line is more or less completed. I cleaned up the use of the vocals (starting at 4:00). Note: I've added the voice to give an idea about how I want it to sound, this is not the actual part planned for the final format (for which I have the lyrics but nothing else).



However, as I start to extend my experiment I'm starting to sense the difficulty of dealing with changing the instruments and the rhythm and finding some that work here and this is where being a trained musician, which I am not, would help.

How do you change afterwards a song's orchestration to something different? No idea at this point.

Now, after a hiatus of almost a year, for health reasons and others, I'm coming back to this. One idea is to take some of the themes and experiment from the ground up, again.

First try (the first minute is not much by any standards, introducing the first two themes and basic variations and then the re-introduction to the second theme and its treatment at 4:50):



Next, I am trying yet another, more modern approach for the themes that appear in the middle of the song:



This is still nowhere closer to where I want it. The guitars, mainly, and the doubling synths make most of the song sound rather raucous, void of any warmth, real emotion.. Blocked again, for the moment.

As for the lyrics I don't have much. Only, instead of going with a traditional format I'm experimenting with end words that are being assumed at the beginning of the next line:

Into the night,
The light is dancing in circles around me,
I see ..

Anyways, I'm halfway there. Will see what happens :)