This song came about by my jamming along with my drum machine. Some of the preprogrammed rhythms include bass sounds, and it was always fun to work out my guitar to a certain bass/drum pattern. It was fast, it was fun to play, and it would be monotonous for a listener to hear, as the drum machine never lets up.

Every time I finished jamming to that drum pattern, often for an hour or so at a time, I would think to myself, "I've got to use that pattern in a song." It seemed a shame to tame such a wild workout by stitching it into a tight song framework, however, so I never got around to doing it.

After moving to California and getting my recording studio set up, I was looking for a project to get back into the recording groove. I came back to the bass/drum pattern and tried to figure out how I could use it without making it too rhymically long and boring or too structured and tame. It occured to me that with my digital studio, music can be synchronized with the time keeper in the studio. What this meant was, I could record my long guitar solo. I could then edit the bass/drum part and create a new rhythm to back the solo. Despite being a drum machine, I could simulate the drummer reacting to the guitar part or make it sound like the guitarist is picking up on the drummer. Meanwhile, the studio would keep the rhythm and solos lined up no matter how much I edited away.

I ended up with three guitar solos comprising about a half hour's worth of improvisation. Thinking that was too much of a good thing, I turned the second solo backward, usually an interesting effect. However, I was using a lot of sustain on my guitar, causing the notes to ring out at a loud volume for a long time. I discovered that a ringing note with little volume change sounds about the same backward as forward since the sound level never trails off. I thought this over a bit, and chucked out the second guitar solo. I found a different guitar sound with plenty of decay in the signal, and used that to create a new backward guitar part. It sounded better, but it seemed thin compared to the other heavily distorted guitar solos. To fatten up the sound a bit, I then copied the backwards guitar solo, turned it forward, and mixed it back in with the backwards guitar. So, in the second guitar solo, you mainly hear a backward guitar, but there are bits and pieces of the original forward part peeking through here and there.

Trying to think of a title, I was reminded by the length of the song of a drive down the Pacific Coast Highway (with which I was now pretty familiar). Rambling on like an actual trip down the PCH, the song even had three main parts to coincide with the three states through which the highway runs. To play off this idea, I raided my sound effects library for coastal water, seagull and car sounds, framing the song to set the mood.

Unfortunately, the song wasn't quite done. I listened to it over and over, and I realized that, at nearly a half hour, it was a bit long and even I was having trouble paying attention through the length of it. I wondered if perhaps I should trim down the guitar solos a bit? Use only the juiciest bits. I didn't like that idea too much, as I felt that the searching bits between the better bits were just as important in tracing the evolution of the solo.

It reminded me of a song on Led Zeppelin's The Song Remains the Same live album. The original vinyl release of the album included a song, No Quarter, with a long Jimmy Page guitar solo. When the solo starts, you hear Page poking about here and there, trying a few different ideas. He picks one out, plays with it, puts it down. Eventually, this searching leads him to explode to a fiery conclusion that makes the song. Hearing Page figure out the solo at the beginning is half the fun. You can hear his mind at work. Yet, when a newly mixed version of the album came out years later, the introductory work was edited out and it went straight into the blazing solo. It makes it sound like Page had this worked out ahead of time and simply played it back, rather than showing it to be a moment of hard work and sweaty inspiration.

Ultimately, I had to decide to do what's best for the song itself. I was no Jimmy Page, and the world could likely get along without hearing me in search of the next riff. Besides, my last album had been an experiment with extended song composition, so it's not like I needed another lengthy epic. I loaded the finished song back into the studio and began to trim. I have to admit the solos became more succinct, while still maintaining a bit of that meandering about. And at just over fifteen minutes in length, I think the song feels long (like a trip down the PCH) without being quite a test of endurance for the listener. And in art, just as in life, I ended up with my arrival in California.

Rick Hines: electric guitar, MIDI keyboard (congas), drum machine, sound effects.

Produced, arranged, engineered, edited, mixed and mastered by Rick Hines.

Recorded August 16-October 20, 2009 at Rick's Studio, San Diego, California.