Night Vision is the 4th track on the ‘Running Behind Time’ album, and like Expectation, it’s one of my earliest compositions.
Lyrically, it tells the story of a single guy on a night out, looking to ‘get lucky’ 😊. Verses one to three continue into each other, without any definitive choruses in between.
In verse 1, he feels anticipation and excitement, wondering what the evening will bring. In verse 2, he’s in a basement bar/club where there’s a live band playing, drinking at the bar and checking out his surroundings. In verse 3, he gets eye contact going with a girl he fancies, and ‘after one more gin’, gets up the courage to go over to her and start chatting 😊.
Musically, the structure is standard 4/4 time, but I wanted to create a 5/4 vibe, so that the listener feels the song as 5/4 time, similar to the old classic ‘Not Fade Away’ (Buddy Holly, Rolling Stones). This is reflected in the guitar pattern played in 5-note phrases. I also played a ‘broken’ drum pattern with off-beats and ghost notes, to facilitate this vibe.
However, for verse 4, there is a change of time signature to 6/8. This is the part of the lyrical story where the guy goes with the girl to her place, and soon starts to discover that things are not all they seem to be with her.
This 6/8 mid-section ends with a guitar solo. Or rather, two guitar solos 😊. Each guitar solo is an 8-bar progression. They were played by the same guitar player, using two different guitars. (After the initial recordings were made, I transferred to his studio where he added guitar parts to some of the songs, and enhanced the editing, mixing, and mastering for the whole album).
After the 6/8 mid-section and guitar solos, the song reverts back to the 5/4 vibe for the final verse. For the listener, this is an unexpected break back to the original time signature.
I specifically wrote the song in that structure: 4/4 with 5/4 overlay vibe, moving into a 6/8 mid-section, then reverting back into the original time signature. Anyway, with a song clocking in at just over 5 minutes long, the 5/4 vibe on its own throughout would start to become monotonous. It also fits the lyrical progression, where the guy’s night takes an unexpected change of direction. I felt that this best enhances the mood of the song, and keeps the listener interested.
In this final verse, the guy in the story is going home in the early hours of the morning, frustrated and ‘left with an empty feeling’. But in the back of his mind, he knows he’ll do it all again next time around 😊.