The production and recording of “The Ordeal” was done when I was quite young (in 1997), as I transitioned from cassette-studio to digital recording equipment (which was quite revolutionary at the time). The recording was then transferred to newer digital equipment a couple of times, as I expanded my recording gear.
When I started to work on the released version, I decided to merge it with a live recording of the song (where I had the individual instruments on a multitrack) to get the energy and tempo changes from the live show.
This is a time consuming job, which has become the standard for many songs in this project.
The song was performed extensively with my bands “Woo” and “Ninth”, especially when we were performing several sets of music.
I remember vividly when we played an all nighter in Little Rock, and after taking down the equipment at 6 am, we jumped right into the hotel swimming pool without taking off our clothes, as it was super hot.
This didn’t land well with the hotel crew as they had to empty the pool after our stunt.
It was fun to play this song live, and the crowd used to go crazy.
Even our managers and business people highlighted this song as one of the potential radio hits (pretty big business guys too!). But there’s always a catch, & obviously they wanted me to shorten it.
It went like: “Wow this is great!, just shorten it to 3 minutes and we’re really talking!! We’ll get heavy rotation on this!”
And maybe I should,
but I never did.