Substitute Angel Lyrics

i wrote subby in the fall of 2006. it started as this song called "people that i used to know," and was totally different. i decided the chorus was the only good part of that song, so i totally rewrote the verses. then after that, i decided i didnt like the chorus, so i rewrote that too. so it became a completely different song, but basically the same topic. it quickly became one of those songs that i always played, and it was a favorite of mine for a long time. then i got totally fucking sick of it, but i think its coming back around now. we didnt really practice this one before going up to record since it is so electronic based. so then in the studio, sapone and anthony had the idea to have real drums come in to beef up the choruses. they also changed up the rhythm a little bit (before it was straighter), which made it a lot cooler. and the toms sound big and sweet. we kept a lot of the electronics from the demo, but sapone ran them through a bunch of effects and good preamps to make them better. i remember having a lot of anxiety about playing the fingerpicking acoustic guitar part in the verses, because it is tough to play and im not that good at guitar. we recorded it in sapone's kitchen, and amazingly, i was able to play it decently without too many takes. it was cool in the kitchen cause sometimes we would get random animal noises from outside during a take. if you listen really closely at the beginning of the track, you can hear a bird squawking and it is fucking awesome and we were very adament about keeping that on there and i think its one of my favorite pieces of the record. we made the mistake of recording vocals for this one kinda near the end of things, and my voice was totally blown from screaming and being really sick. you can definitely hear the condition of my voice on the verses, but i actually think its cool and adds to the feel of the song. however, my voice was being so shitty that i could not physically sing the choruses and some of the background vocals, so we actually used the tracks from the demo. i think its cool that its not tooo noticeable in terms of quality, but you can definitely hear that im suddenly not so sick. oh all the pianos are from the demos too. yessss demos! we kept putting off doing the vocals in the bridge for some reason, and we actually almost forgot about them. the morning i was leaving, i was getting all my stuff together and seriously about to hit the road, when we suddenly realized that we hadnt done the vocals for the bridge. ayieee! my voice was so fucking hilarious at this point, i could barely speak. but we busted them out right there in the bathroom using a distant mic. i think you can hear the heater making noises too. i think it is awesome, but it easily couldve/shouldve been a disaster. guitars were our typical setup: my gibson nighthawk through the vox ac50. acoustic was a borrowed taylor. bass was a fender through an ashdown bass magnifier and a chandler germanium preamp.