Only You Know Why

Revisiting an old song from 1981

I reached way down in my bag of songs to pull this one out. It popped up in my head the other day and wouldn’t go away. I wrote ‘Only You Know Why’ in the fall of 1981, and it was on the collection of songs called ‘Metallic Scorn’. Figured it might work for a ‘Live From the inSync Asylum’ track.

I had to go take a look at my old 2 and 4 track quarter inch tape boxes, to see if this was a 4-track recording in 1981 - and it was. One of the first. I had a Tascam 34 back then, which I sold to get the Tascam 38 8-track at some point. From what I remember equipment wise I had a Fender Twin Reverb, Gibson Melody Maker, a Casio keyboard, a Boss Doctor Rhythm beat box, a couple AKG D310 mics, and a mixer that was a small Tascam or Teac - can’t remember. This was before I got the 18 channel Ramsa board with the 38.

I did the backing track for this new recording earlier this week on Dec. 3, recording a guitar, drums, a couple keyboards including keyboard bass, a guide vocal and Bvox. On the 4^th I did the live guitar and vocal take. As on previous live takes, I did it without headphones, and without monitoring the guitar – which was recorded direct into Cubase thru my Radial J48, and later put thru a Neural DSP Tone King Imperial MKII amp plugin. I used my $90 left-handed-strung-righty Fender Mexicaster . I did two takes. I filmed it using 3 webcams into a single 4k file recorded in OBS studio.

Check out the video on YouTube and let me know what you think...