Join Along: Studio Notes

Join Along has collected dust since its release in 2022, I always wanted to re-record the song.

A still from the official video: Watching my good friend Kyle do a cutback while playing live on a stage overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Looking back to 2022, it was a good year in the studio. I had just started to dial in my live studio recording sound with the same people that now comprise my working band. It was the year the music industry started to come back to life after the long hiatus of the pandemic. On an experiment, I set up a live band room in the tall ceiling room in the front of my house. The drums were mic-ed properly and all of the other instruments ran silently into a Universal Audio Apollo x8p to ensure the drum tracking was flawless. Everything was setup for overdubbing, but we found the drums and bass never needed more than 2 takes. Compared to this method, the initial recording was little more than a demo.

The initial recording was a throwback to a time when I thought of myself more of an Astral Weeks era Van Morrison, who smoked way too much weed. I wasn’t that good as a performer yet, and I still used to get crippling stage fright leading up to every gig. Funny, now that I dont smoke as much weed, I think i enjoy perfoming a lot more. Perhaps its because I practice more. As much as I’d like to, I have no right to blame anything on the herbstalk.

Here is the original acoustic version of the release:
https://music.apple.com/us/album/join-along-single/1644013308

The released version of the song was good enough. In retrospect, I may have released it to close the door on that creative period and start something new. At the time I may have not been aware of it, but everything around me was starting to move fast. Looking back , it was a great time in my life. I wrote so many songs that I’m still releasing songs from that prolific period. There was a time when most new songs I’d try out at local open mic nights. I often played with an acoustic bass, using a dobro as my go to axe, but a few things made me change direction. My friend Marco was an amazing upright player, and he played electric with us a bunch when we first started out. What an amazing musician. I think by mid summer Marco had moved from San Diego, so I had to figure out a replacement. I tried in the studio, but I could not make the upright bass translate to my larger electric band. I had to adapt a new sound to what my new band members were brining to the gigs each week. The addition of a keyboard alone demanded an instrument that could tonally compliment the sophisticated sound of a Rhodes, Hammond or Clavinova. Shortly after I recorded those last few demos with upright bass and acoustic, I started playing regularly with a new band line up at a friends local venue. Lucky for me one of the coolest human beings on the planet, my friend Dan Greenbaum, rips at bass and just about any instrument he touches.

Within about a year, my new place to showcase new material was accross the street from my house, overlooking my home surf break. Things progressed quickly thanks to the demands of local music scene, we had already built a fanbase of friends, neighbirs, and family. At the beginning of 2022 we were playing on the sidewalk ( Do It Right ), but by the end of the Spring we had a stage.

May 21, 2022 the first time the stage was installed at the Camp Store. Initially the stage was built of 6 panels, and did not have the last row in the back. I requested a bigger stage to fit a 5 piece band. Ask and ye shall receive.

By the end of that summer, the new band was firing on all cylinders both on the stage and in the home studio. All the fun we had improvising on stage in 2022 reshaped my ideas of what recording meant to me. Every show, I taped religiously both video and tracked audio, what I saw was pure magic. I studied the recordings to see where I could improve both as a muscian and performer. In the studio, I wanted to match the groove we locked into on stage so it changed my entire approach to tracking. I started falling into a process where all the recordings I worked on the previous year, was mixed mastered and released the following year. 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 were perfect examples of that process. two albums came from that era: Songs of Wanderlust and I am Nowhere, I am Everywhere.

If I learned anything since 2022, it’s that if you take the time to record every live show you do, you have more than enough collateral to work with for you social and marketing efforts. I makes life easy, because with minimal effort, stills from recorded videos can be saved out for posters or album covers. I also learned that using 2 seperate iphones in tandem is the easiest way to shoot concert footage. What does this have to do with the studio? Once i had a demo mixed or mastered, I never had a shortage of media to use for the release of the single or album. When traveling, I not only recorded my band, but recorded everything interesting in the world around me.

I think it’s fair to say that there was a time that I sucked both as a producer, and as a videographer. We’ve all been there. The best way to improve in anything, is to simply do it. Release your art to the public, so that you can move on and not be held hostage by a single piece of art, or period of influence . There’s always something you could’ve done better in retrospect, know that. Making art has never been about perfection, only the forward movement and the search for continuous improvement. Often, when I talk about the recording process, I understand its so naturally dynamic that by the time I release an album or a single, I’ve moved onto new material.

It’s good to look back to see the road traveled. I have a few more of these to do to cover the work I did in 2025, I want to have an official video and “Studio Notes“ written from all of the songs from the album, I have two remaining so once those are done, I’ll continue my work on the new album. I keep coming back to this footage from the first time we played Join Along to a live audience. I had been working on the vocal tracking so much that we performed the song almost verbatim, thats why even though the lyrics aren’t perfectly synced, they’re damn close. Close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades.

On September 25, 2022 the band is doing a sound check , the same show we used footage of for the Join Along music video.

It was also a perfect night, a friend send me a recording of the sunset that night which i used in the intro, you can see here from this picture, just what kind of night we are talking about.

The same sunset from the music video, just across the street.

The instrumentation of the recording, I believe was from the same recording sessions that we recorded the Do It Right release. No click track. I initially had our piano player do a take on electric piano, then another one on a Rhodes or Whirly. There was one take where he began the song on piano then switched as the song picked up momentum. I thought that was brilliant so I kept it. I still remember the feeling of listening to our first studio live recording here at the house.

This article describes that session in depth:

Click tracks? Music only started using click tracks in the 1980s, plenty of good music has an organic tempo that ebbs and flows. If Elvin Jones was still alive, do you think a producer would make him play to a click track? Nope. If you’re Intrested, Logic Pro X has a feature that analyzes adapts the project tempo to the instruments being recorded live. As the song progresses, you can see the slight variation in tempo as we move from verse, to chorus, to bridge, and so on. I believe the feature is called Smart Tempo or Adaptive Tempo, I’ve found it to be reliable except for when I try to synch with a video of the same performance.

The reason I’m referencing the older article, is it talks about the decisive time when I moved away from the click track. I still record demos and songs to a click track, but I firmly believe that our true sound is outside the click track. Our drummer has recorded with a click, he can, but that’s not what we are looking for. My goal in all of my future recordings is to have our album versions of each song to be recorded without a click track, using our “studio live“ method of recording which we are still perfecting.

There’s not much more to the recording of the song. It was very easy. Almost too easy because I had already released the song as a single and was adding it to my set list. There’s something about the chord changes that make it a pleasure to both listen to, and perform live. Until next time…

LYRICS:
She stepped right off of the train,
Headed straight across the platform
Behold, such a beautiful face, (she came up to me)
Asked me for a lighter, you got one

Let me see the moonlight in your eyes
Let me see the New York City lights
Let us smoke some incense and fill the air
Baby don’t you know that we’re almost there

Because!

Tonight it’s only rock and roll, babe
You can have it any way we want, or else waltz away
Madison Square, walk right inside
We’re gonna dance to our favorite songs all night
Gonna get crazy, have ourselves a hell of a time

If you want a right place,
If you want a piece of the action, action
The whole, such a sweet embrace
Always amplifies attraction

Let me see the moonlight in your eyes
Let me see the New York City lights
Let us smoke some incense and fill the air
Baby don’t you know that we’re almost there

Because!

Tonight it’s only rock and roll, babe
You can have it any way we want, or else waltz away
Madison Square, walk right inside
We’re gonna dance to our favorite songs all night
Gonna get crazy, have ourselves a hell of a time

When we missed the last train home
Camped out for Letterman tickets but got none
Floated through outer space
Rockefeller Center and then some

Let me see the moonlight in your eyes
Let me see the New York City lights
Let us smoke some incense and fill the air
Baby don’t you know that we’re almost there

Because!

Tonight it’s only rock and roll, babe
You can have it any way we want, or else waltz away
Madison Square, walk right inside
We’re gonna dance to our favorite songs all night
Gonna get crazy, have ourselves a hell of a time

METADATA:
Join Along
The Ram
UPC :197146039459
Release date: September 23, 2022
ASCAP Work ID: 920728999
ASCAP Singer Songwriter IPI Number: 375350750
ASCAP Publisher IPI Number: 375351159

ABOUT THE SONG:
The story behind this song takes us back to September 15-20 1987, not sure which night it was my guess it was either a Friday or a Saturday given that I was going to school. I was a freshman in college at SUNY New Paltz and went down to NYC to see the Grateful Dead, take a listen and hear what went down. Join Along is a melodic homage to an incident that happened after a Madison Square Garden Grateful Dead show. My friends and I ended up stranded in NYC late nite after missing the last train north on the Hudson line. We ended up cruising up to Radio City, Rockefeller Plaza to camp out for David Letterman tickets. 6 country kids, very high on acid, safe on the marble floors of NBC in the 80s.

About the Ram
Mark “The Ram” O’Donnell is an independent American composer and visual artist based out of Carlsbad, California. He performs original, surf-inspired, West Coast rock-and-roll.

For more information about the Ram and his music, go to www.TheRamMusic.com

More Information
I currently use DistroKid to get everything out to the streaming platforms, Disco for all sync requests, Bands In Town to list live shows, and Substack for just about everything else.

The Ram: Art, Music, Saltwater, & Snow, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.