I realized the verse start/end were a chordal palindrome, the reversal made for an interesting tension/release.
Any verb on the vocals is just from the master bus, apart from that I thought I was tracking with the helios 69 (my favorite of the UAD mic preamps) and c-suite on it, but apparently they were turned off, so it's actually just raw from the mic with zero processing at that end or on the channel.
There's some generally light processing on the master - Capitol Chambers for a transparent "cohesion" reverb, then a tape plugin which is really only used for it's handy Vu meter so I can level the output, followed by an EQ where I pushed the treble and cut some mids, and finally BX master-desk that I use because it has a tool that takes all really low frequencies and pans them dead center which helps reduce mush a little and it also has a hopefully not too dreadfully heavy handed compression.
Having said that I realize the vocals do sound compressed, but they also sound that way without the master stuff on so I suspect it's a byproduct of me being so close I was pretty much eating the mic while recording. I was using it off-axis slightly to try and reduce plosives, breaths and sibilance, which lead to an interestingly slightly muffled sound (part of what I recovered with the treble push on the master), I wasn't expecting that level of rejection.
