Tom Tipton is clearly not Irish. So when we first were conceptualizing his Best of Tom Tipton CD and we decided to add 4 new recordings to this rich treasure trove of his musical life, it was a bit of a surprise to me that he came up with the idea of this Irish classic song.

But, as Tom said, this was a song that he had sung since childhood, taught to him on his mother’s knee and rendered a capella many times over his life to his most appreciative audiences. [A capella: without instrumentation, voice only.]

It seemed like a novel addition to a CD otherwise full of inspirational Spiritual and Gospel classics. So I said to Tom, “Send me the music and we’ll do it!” He answered, “I have no music.  I’ve always just done it a capella.”

Thus began the great adventure.

I spent months searching for this music on Google and coming up empty-handed. The closest I came to it was a man in New Zealand somewhere who would sell it to me for $40.  I was willing to pay this exorbitant fee until he slipped in the fact that the shipping would cost me an extra $95. Perhaps it was coming by Pony Express and I had to pay for the rider’s lunches. I passed on the purchase.

I felt that the song was too long to be all a capella on an album. Live is one thing; an album is different. So I decided to just make up the chords against the melody that Tom sang, a melody that, by the way, I had never heard before. Though I liked the song very much, I just wasn’t coming up with a real point of view for the arrangement.

Then Tom said the sentence that gave me the idea. One day he said, “I’ve always envisioned myself walking through the Irish countryside at night singing this song.” That did it.

I pictured this man coming home late one night after wandering the world for years. He climbs the last hill, stops, and looks down at his old sleepy cottage there in the glen, smoke curling out of the chimney. Finally he’s home. He finishes singing the song and continues on down the hill to the waiting arms of his sweet old mama – who may or may not still be with us.

I had Tom first come into the studio and record the song a capella. In order to keep him perfectly on pitch I pre-recorded a low ‘C’ drone for about 3:30 that he sang against.  Luckily the song would work against this constant drone and we had to keep the pitch perfect so that I could later orchestrate against his singing voice.

Tom sang his usual beautiful and heartfelt rendering and I sent him home – his job done.

I then pictured the song in my imagination with the story Tom and I had devised, and figured out where he came up the path, where he stopped and where he continued on down the path in the song.

Then I went to my sound effects library. First I gathered the usual sounds of night – crickets, soft breezes, night birds and actually found an Irish whippoorwill and gave him a shot at stardom – singing a duet with Tom. I also researched and was fortunate to find ‘footsteps on gravel’ which were walking too fast – so I edited each one separately and placed them in a slower cadence to get more of a feeling of an older and tired man walking.

Then, after laying each footstep into the track, one by one, I panned the footsteps so that they started on the far left speaker and then slowly swung center as I imagined the man walking up the hill. I also worked for an hour creating a splash of gravel to give the feeling of when the man stops. At the end of the song he walks on as I pan the footsteps slowly into the far right speaker.

It worked! If I shut my eyes, I could hear the man walking up a hill and coming towards me. But first I had to consider lowering the volume on the footsteps at first and then raising it slowly as he approached. Hours of work just for the footsteps, but worth it.

Then I laid in all the night sounds, the crickets and the breezes and the birds against the song. It was slowly coming to an eerie reality. I got him to the top of the hill and I wanted to establish Old Ireland. I imagined leftovers (what would we do without our imaginations?) – leftovers of Irish harps and Irish bagpipes and Irish fiddles floating through the valleys and mountains on the breezes at night.

I went to my Irish head and created Irish musical licks all in the Key of C and placed them in at random against the song not caring to score perfectly, but trying to evoke these tunes on the breeze as he stands and takes in the cool night air of old Ireland. I brought the low C drone back in to add portent to the moment. I wanted to build to the entrance of the strings so that the strings coming in would release a flood of emotion as only strings can do, but I needed to build to it. The drone helped build that musical tension as well.

It was all about the drama of the man returning home and the telling of the story and the matching of it all up to the lyric of the song and to Tom’s rich emotional performance.

I wanted to nail the moment when he first saw his home. He had walked all that way to get there and I knew the moment of the first sighting would be anticipated, emotional, and sweet.

I had decided to play it in strings. I knew that after all those realistic sounds and the a capella treatment, a string orchestra coming in at some point would be dramatic and oh so heartfelt. So I brought in the strings as he stands on the hill overlooking his home.  The heart leaps; the strings soar.

And then the man, Tom, walks on home to be, at last, reunited with his angel mama, old Ireland and a cottage in old Donagle.

You can listen to this song and re-live that story now through the wonderful world of the internet. So strap on those headphones or sit square between those stereo speakers and take the journey with Tom and me.

To here this song, click here.

To buy this song and others from Watchfire Music’s The Best of Tom Tipton, click here.