YAY! Xenoblade time!!!! =D
This cover has been many months in the making and I'm just beyond thrilled to finally share it with you all today! Love Xenoblade and love the music and I've always viewed it as my playground for all sorts of collabs with friends ahaha, just such wonderful and limitless potential for chamber music arranging. After I finished the Torna DLC two years ago I was so emotional I was like OMG HAVE TO COVER THIS ENDING THEME plus it's a Yasunori Mitsuda track and really, who doesn't like that lol.
So this first started out as a viola/piano cover (LOL guitar solo sounded like viola hoedown), put it aside for a year, then getting to know Josh last year I was like OMG KILLER GUITAR CHOPS what can I get him on lmao and this was the perfect thing. So I expanded it to include PitTan on violin as well, since I had gotten to know her from the Xenoblade Main Theme cover, and Animevivi of course doing the vocal line on viola. (Would also like to state for the record I spent many many hours creating guitar tabs only for Josh to be like, you know, I can actually read standard notation better than tabs, can I get like, real notes, so I had to convert it all back OTL but it's all good!! I had just never met a guitarist who didn't read tabs lol. Also an F in the chat for all the time I spent transcribing the solo as he improvised an absolutely face-melting solo of his own and I was like holy crap let's go with yours lol)
Once Josh got back to me with his stems he sounded so awesome I DIED omg. Literally laid on the floor in disbelief I mean he even added in these extra stems in Nashville tuning (which I had to look up lol) just for interesting Tom Petty flavor. I was like ok no more halfassing this needs to be epic ALL HANDS ON DECK!!! Wrote in a cello part to flesh out the strings better and thankfully Israfelcello was up for it, and decided a badass female vocalist was needed. I had just discovered Lacey last year and her channel is like crack to me, just hopelessly addicted lol plus she's just an incredible human being, so I immediately flailed in her DMs with a bunch of crying and heart emojis and so thankful she was willing to lend her incredible set of pipes to this cover!!!!
(SPOILERS)
I love how this song has such a beautiful and sad, wistful vibe, like Lora's spirit singing to Jin. Lacey is such a powerful, compelling performer and I love that she brought her signature raw passionate fierceness to this, which is exactly what I wanted. I have always felt Xenoblade 2 was really Jin's story, and the Torna DLC really drove that home. We play as Lora, but the narrative is all through Jin's eyes--his palpable despair and desperation seeing the dying Lora in his arms and making a terrible split-second decision that alters the core of his existence forever. Especially hearing the lyric line, "I know you'll be fine..." We know from the main game that this is sadly not the case. Once again cannot thank my wonderful collaborators enough for their hard work on exploring the emotions of that tragic scene and the fallout afterwards and bringing this cover to life!!
Creating a video with a vocalist was also something that was new for me so I was like omg six way splitscreen is unacceptable. Studied a bunch of Janet Jackson and Mariah Carey music videos and focus is all on the singer so I ended up editing myself out of most of this hahaha WHICH IS TOTALLY FINE you get enough of me around here anyways lol.
PLEASE FOLLOW THESE AMAZING WONDERFUL PEOPLE!
VOCALS: @LaceyJohnsonMusic
GUITAR: / @xnarkyvgm
VIOLIN: @PitTan
VIOLA: @animevivi
CELLO: @IsrafelCello
PIANO AND ARRANGEMENT: me!
There might be more Xenoblade around here, or some other random stuff, as I ended up completely rewriting A Chapel and it's now 30% more difficult and I have to practice it a LOT before the next Tactics cover OTL but I hope you'll like the new version!!!! Thank you so much for listening and sticking around, as always!
10 мар 2021
