"Monday 3:05"

[Johnson]

This is a piece of music I wrote entltled “Monday 3:05”. I should mention here that this song, plus “The Awakening” were part of a mini “Album” that Mario and I put together many years ago (yes, remember that term?… if not, I’ll refresh your memories… it was what a compilation of music that was assembled for personal play back was once called… in the “old” days of course…)

Anyway… this piece was part of a compilation that Mario and I put together along with two of Mario’s songs, “Leaves of Tears” and “Ballad of the Prophet” as well as “Flight of the Eagle” that Mario and I wrote together. The name of the “album” was called Silent Waves…. To say it had “limited distribution” would be an understatement… but it certainly was an incredible labor of love and collaboration.

Since I enjoy VH1’s “Behind the Music” so much… please indulge me to give a little bit of the background of how this particular piece of music came to be.

While the instrumental music that I have composed over the years does not have lyrics per se, (hence the term instrumental!) …there certainly are inner words and thoughts and meanings to each piece.

We all have our individual ways to get away, collect our thoughts, summarize and put the pieces of our lives together. For me, aside from drawing or playing music… I love to go on long drives… I know this is certainly not for everyone… but it is something that has always worked for me. Some of these drives have taken me from Boston to Cape Cod, others have taken me to look at the ocean and Gulf of Mexico in Key West… and certainly a whole lot in between.

During one particular drive back from Cape Cod in the middle of the night, I was caught in a torrential rainstorm… the wind and swell of the falling rain was as intense as it was mesmerizing. The clacking of the windshield wipers back and forth as they tried to keep up with the rain was the one rhythmic constant as the weather seemed to threaten everything around my car on the highway.

When I got back home around 3:00am (on a Monday morning… hence the name of the song) I sat down at my keyboard and played the basic melody of this piece to hear here…with the sound of the windshield wipers still rhythmically playing in my head…. The piece kind of grew from there… with Mario later on laying down a bass line.

Now, while that may be the technical chronology of what led up to the formation of this piece, what I really wanted to capture in the music were the emotional thoughts that I had that night…

So why is this song posted on Daheshville? This piece for me represented a sadness and a longing… All the music, videos, tutorials, words and images here on Daheshville are everyone’s efforts to honor the life and memory and legacy of Dr. Dahesh. Having never had the opportunity to meet Dr. Dahesh in my life, my thoughts that night were centered around that sadness.

The rain and thunder you hear is an actual recording of rain and thunder…I remember the producer I worked with in the studio “arguing” with me that we are not going to open a piece of music with 30 seconds of just the sound of rain!… eventually we reached a compromise…

Anyway, I played the keyboards and synthesizer/effects parts on this piece. Mario composed and played the driving bass line that for me was like the rhythm of the windshield wipers that holds the whole piece together in the background. An incredibly talented friend of ours from graduate school, Niccolo Casewit, played the wonderful violin part that follows the evocative ups and downs and torment of the rain. A studio drummer played all the drum and percussive fill parts.

Well that’s pretty much it… thank you for reading all this…

Here it is, MONDAY 3:05

Music by David Michael Johnson, Copyright (p) by Where I Wanna Be Studios
All Rights Reserved.

[Mario]

Beautiful piece. Brings back a lot of memories. I remember when Niccolo was getting into his "zone" during the laying of the successive tracks (this one and the other two — Ballad of the Prophet and Leaves of Tears) we kept hearing the thumping of his foot through the microphones. None of us had anticipated that. We had to re-record after we were able to find a rug for him to stand on and ... thump away. And that worked out for the best, as he got even better after having warmed up during the first couple of takes. The drummer did a great job also. Working that hi hat like that, and keeping perfect time is not easy at all. If we ever perform this live again (as we once did at Kresge Center) I'd use an upright bass and bow during certain parts.

[Johnson]

Musically, this was kind of a heady time for Mario and myself. While we had both independently and then together written a fair amount of music... this was the first time we had actually recorded some of them in a REAL recording studio!

Prior to these REAL studio recordings... and before we even met for the first time in 1983... we each had purchased (completely independent of the other) one of the two versions of the very first four track cassette recorders that were made by Tascam... specifically catering to the home studio musician.

I remember during one of the first times Mario and I talked to each other about our respective music, we both kind of mentioned "Tascam" and "four track recording"... and actually knew what the other was talking about... you have to understand this was when "home studios" were at their absolute infancy (and before computers, before CDs, before mini disks, before mp3s... yes I know... hard to imagine... but there was life before all those things).