i think this song lives for musical dynamics, but it takes some courage to get stuck in and dig them out. for example, the acoustic guitars are overly present all the way through the song. for me anyway, i find that uninteresting....monotonous even. there are times where they need to be very present, and times where other instruments should be grabbing our attention thereby allowing the acoustic guitars to back off.....let's call it contrast. listening to the levels here, it's too safe, there's no build or release, like there's no real sense of excitement when the horns come in, for example (check out some big band stuff to get the vibe these things are capable of - if you haven't seen a big band concert live, you haven't lived yet!). loudness, and hence energy (not all loudness has energy.....just loudness, so it needs care), is completely static and at one level all the time. i think if you worked this dynamic more, your mix would really communicate.
the piano is a bit of a damp squib, eh? i agree it's a difficult thing to get to work nicely, especially with the Rhodes. if you can make the thing more present and part of the action (it doesn't need to be part of the action all the time, again there are some opportunities to bring it out though), it can work well with the Rhodes as a team element. my approach was to make the piano attack duck/sidechain the Rhodes, so the piano forms the attack of the Rhodes.....allowing the Rhodes to come in and fill the space where the piano tends to fade out quite quickly (i think that's an advantage though). this also helps to overcome some of the masking tendencies between the two instruments.
back briefly to the acoustic guitars...i'd drop something like a de-esser on the transients to keep them in check in the trebles i.e. dynamic EQ. once these things get much beyond 6kHz their harmonics can get very brittle, sharp and unpleasant and some of this was experienced herein? it's quickly solved. talking of treble...the vocal's a touch sibilant this end; it takes some managing here though.
i liked that you brought the levels up during the intro. perhaps the bass could have come up a notch more....then back it off for the first verse. the outro needs to really rock though, to push the groove. sadly it's a short and sweet opportunity, but having said that we've a good lead up to the 'potentially' breezy conclusion - Patrick has set it up for us, we just need to exploit it. notice how settled the mix all sounded though, too orderly and well behaved? i think so..subjectively.
fundamentally important, you don't have any train wreaks here, but a super foundation on which to pull out some more energy, dynamic and interest. it's soooooo close.......you've done a great job thus far.
v2 with some tweaks?
come on, lose some inhibitions
laters,,
