Misfits and Slow Learners Track 9: The Heart That Wishes by Cub Lea as Hot Spot Last updated 12/04

Music Menu | The Winter Heat Project | Hot Spot

Download 32kbps 44.1kHz full-length (3:15) mp3 (mono) 766kb
(Full-fidelity versions at 128kbps and VBR-HQ bitrates are available on "the CD")

Hot Spot version (1987)

	Credits:	Words, music, arrangement & production by Cub Lea, 11/87
	Players:	Cub Lea (all instruments)
	Drums:	Roland TR-505 digital rhythm composer
	Notes:	Recorded and mixed on a Tascam PortaStudio 0.5 4-track cassette recorder 12/87 in a Toronto, Canada rooming house

Winter Heat version (1989)

	Credits:	Words, music, arrangement & production by Cub Lea, 1989
	Players:	Cub Lea (all instruments)
	Releases:	the bunctions: what the hell was that?
	Notes:	Recorded and mixed in Calgary, Canada on a Fostex A-8 deck through a Fostex 12-channel mixer; ripped from Cr02 Dolby C cassette using a SoundBlaster Live! Value.
		Additional notes applicable to all tracks

Download Winter Heat version 32kbps 44.1kHz full-length (3:04) mp3 (mono) 728kb
(This version features much higher fidelity and stronger but less emotive performances)

Concept

Believe it or not, this is actually a tip to Bob Dylan's It's All Right Ma (I'm Only Bleeding). The lyric was written as poetry in 1982 after a series of nasty brushes with harsh reality and is virtually unchanged here.

It was matched to this music only after I realized that I had a hard rock tune in my "ideas file" that fit it perfectly. And it was this discovery that led to a writing style which I've kept ever since. Normally I start from the lyric and work from there. But I usually have a fairly substantial body of half-formed musical ideas and structures, one of which is either very close to a good match for the lyric, or spot-on as this one turned out to be. It works for me only because I have a peculiar form of congenital brain damage which allows me to work unconsciously and effectively provided that I don't have much more than a clue what I'm actually doing.

The song was quirky enough (in its day, at least) that I decided to re-do it for the Winter Heat "final demos" in 1989. This is one of very few songs for which I never modified the lyric between versions. This lyric came to me several years earlier in a Southern Ontario motel room; I was in a deep depression from having spent some five months and forty-odd auditions unsuccessfully trying to get a paying gig, and this expresses the deep sense of frustration and despair I felt at staring in the face of not just a broken dream, but what I felt at the time was one of my last chances to prove myself.

Execution

This is a song I really wanted to lay down well, and all in all it didn't come out too badly. The idea was to pair a clean, jangly rhythm track with loads of bass and top end in the left channel with a gut-grinding, mid-heavy driven lead guitar in the right channel and run the rumbling, double-time bass underneath through a slow phase shifter. This relentless sonic assault contrasts harshly to the airy, breaking chorus, giving a feel to this song which may seem overdone today but was actually pretty rare and interesting in a hard rock track at the time I recorded this.

This song is a bitch for me to sing, since the entire verse is very close to the top of my range, and the high notes at the end of verse and refrain are at the top end of my range. I hadn't developed a clean transition to falsetto in my vocal training at the time, making this a true ordeal to record. A full two years later, the Winter Heat version shows just how difficult this song was for me to sing well...or honestly. the pathertic "Show me!" line in the Winter Heat version was an improvisation of which I am pretty damned ashamed. Still, as hard rock goes, there's an awful lot of money being made off an awful lot worse.

The Heart That Wishes

Last night I got up on the roof
And looked down on my gutter frame
Junky jade and terror eyes
A heart that wishes for the rise in dying

I looked around the walls had ears
A thousand people saw me there
Living sin to God and man
A mind I could not understand for trying

I justified this hard demand
By swearing that I could not stand
Another moment of the pain
I thought the heart that wished to change would change me

Dawn breaks hard on tired eyes
That hurt so deep they cannot cry
Shut too tight to look outside
Tell me, where's the rise in living

The ring grows tighter round my head
The great crusades I could have led
And noble things I might have said
This dream of dying in my bed is so heartless

The time comes, the choice is clear
To leave the ship or tame that fear
I offer best what I most need
The unrepentant life is not worth living

Men who talk with tongues aflame
To Gods who grant them missions strange
This I never could accept
But still I need a light to face the fire

Last night I got up on the roof
And spat down on my gutter frame
No more jade and terror eyes
I'm tired of wishing for the rise in dying

I need the night to come to terms
With lessons that I need to learn
The light for fighting when I can
And eyes so sharp to understand the writing

Copyright ©1984, 1988 Living Skill Music