It only took me ten years and a change of instrument to get beyond the beautifully dense production and uncover the song’s simple but sturdy bones.

I made this recording in one take with my MacBook Pro’s built-in mic using the basic Audio Recorder (which I usually use for “sketching” song ideas). I dropped the resulting recording onto Garage Band to trim, reduce ambient noise, and tidy up a flubbed guitar note in the last measure. I didn’t have a copy of Jacob’s Ladder handy, so I “sampled” myself using a second track in Garage Band.

Tab

And here’s the tab for my arrangement (more for Future Shaun than any other reason):

Verse                     Chorus         Post-chorus       Bridge             

   Em  E/D#m  Am  Bm         A  Amaj7       E  C#m  A                          
e --------------------    e ----------   e ------------    e ------------------
b ---8---7------1---3-    b ----5-----   b ----9-------    b ------------------
G ---9---8------2---4-    G -6--6-----   G ----9----6--    G ------------------
D ---9---8------2---4-    D -7--6-----   D ---------7--    D ------------------
A ---7---7----0---2---    A -7--------   A -7-------7--    A ---------4--------
E -0---0--------------    E -5--5-----   E ----9----5--    E -2-2-5-2---5-2-5--

Track artwork includes a cc’d photo by Tim Duckett.

Enjoy!

There’s been some recent Flickring about mixing Mint with Fluid. Sam reminded me that I still haven’t posted the giant Mint Fluid icon I made to complement the Fever Fluid icon created for the beta testers. Consider it done.

Three years out Mint has established itself as a mature analytics platform. On average ten new people fall in love with Mint every day. Twenty-five percent of all Mint users like it so much they buy additional licenses for themselves, their friends and their clients. And they’re still writing rave reviews about it—both thorough and concise.

As a mature platform, Mint and its users definitely require less hand-holding. Support only consumes about an hour a day, with a bit more on Mondays. Mint only required four maintenance updates this past year with more regular updates and feature additions reserved for the various official Pepper. The past year also saw the introduction of two new official Pepper and a sub-app:

• Visits Diff displays how each of the timeframes displayed by the Visits pane performed over the previous period.
• Directories groups pages and hits by directory.
• Leaves provides device-appropriate views for multiple Mint installations.

Third-party Pepper developers contributed another twelve Pepper and 64 updates to their various offerings.

Off-screen, Mint appeared in a bare-all piece written by Elliot Jay Stocks for .Net magazine and on the chests of about sixty SXSW 2008 attendees, friends and family.

With Mint finally reaching an age where it can entertain itself, there’s more time to work on a new project or two—both of which have generated ideas that will be making their way back into Mint.