Entries tagged with "songwriting"
Tuesday 17 October 2006
I can’t post the latest Song-a-day pieces, because (1) the sound quality on one of them is terrible, not to mention the playing, (2) the second one’s not done, and (3) they’re part of secret Hallowe’en show plans. Not that it’s that big a secret, I suppose. Regardless, I’m quite proud of them both.
We don’t have time to pull it off for this year, but the secret plan is this: for Hallowe’en - or perhaps some other show, just for the heck of it - we come on dressed as a completely different band, and play our own material in a different style. Of course, knowing the two of us, New Wave seems the most logical and fun choice. I’ve spent the past half hour trying to sing like Neil Tennant.
I mentioned the premise to a friend, who had a related idea: musical improv. Not just improvised music, not just an improvised musical, but improvised drama featuring the players in a band. The audience could throw out suggestions for what style they should perform and the soap opera dynamics that are going on between all the musicians. It’d take a good deal of skill and chutzpah, and no small amount of preparations. But it could be really cool.
On another related tangent, I’ve been tossing around ideas for a while about doing a story-with-songs - not quite a musical, but a narrated story with songs performed by a band, or more than one band (they could change during the story breaks). My chief inspiration was Harry Nilsson’s The Point, which is fun, but it’s by someone else, and it’s not really his best work.
As I type all this, Tarquin is on my lap, pawing at it in a way that’s frankly rude. He’s been really pushy lately about wanting to own my lap and/or chair, and if not, to climb up on my desk. I may have to employ him in my music making (inspired also by this YouTube video, which was passed along to me by Ms Urnash; warning, contains adorable kitten).
I guess you’d call that ailurotoric composition?
Friday 30 June 2006
The song-a-day revival continues! (It’s an occasional project / working method I started a couple years ago - here’s the little manifesto-to-myself that I wrote back then.)
Feels good to be back in the saddle. Here’s the latest piece, working title “Piltdown”. Curious little one minute boogie.
2006_0629_piltdown.mp3 (1.1 megs)
Working order: drum loop - guitar - bass - lyrics/vocals - new drums. The guitar playing is definitely very David Byrne.
I haven’t been letting myself get away with just sketching in “la la la” melodies instead of lyrics. And I notice my subject matter (if you can call it that) is shifting a little bit too… though some themes continue to run through almost all my songs.
Also, from earlier in the week, a little snippet of me messing with the Filter Queen, using it on everything in sight:
2006_0626_glimmers.mp3 (700 k)
Today’s bon mot — “Like a fish in the headlights.”
Saturday 6 May 2006
On the way to meet up with my SO and a friend in Kensington, I lost my way and ran across the great Bob Snider, who was busking on Baldwin St. I snagged a copy of his CD, and he asked if there was any kind of song I wanted to hear.
On the subway I’d been revamping my plans for a series of podcast radio plays set in a mysterious, Kensington-like neighbourhood. “Anything about the neighbourhood, or the city?” I said.
“I got one,” he said, and launched into “The Street Takes You In”, a haunting, cautionary song about, well, the street. And then he sang one he’d recently completed, which I understand is called “Plum” — an altogether happier tune. (“Let’s invent a game for two where I play me and you play you / and the object is to figure out what all the rules are for. / Pin the tail on the monkey in the middle / Top Banana, second fiddle. / Loser is the one caught keeping score.”) Both wonderful. :D
Also, I got my copy of the latest Spacing magazine in the mail… looks awesome (and it’s part of the reason I was thinking about the radio plays).
So many things to think about lately. I want to take piano lessons and set up a decent little home studio, and there’s all those other musical projects I want to tackle too. So impatient.
Oh, and Christopher Eccleston may be the next Number Six. O.o (I can see it now. Number Two, secretly a disgruntled Doctor Who fan, demanding “Why did you resign?”)
Thursday 23 September 2004
My favorite music this past month or so has been post-punk/new wave stuff, from about 1975-85: The Fall, XTC, Wire, Talking Heads, Devo, that sorta thing.
For a long time I’ve wanted to be in a dancey art-band, and lately I’ve wanted to draw on that musical heritage to make something infectious, chaotic, beautiful, angry and weird. I’ve tried my hand writing some material along those lines, even, and it sure is cathartic. :D
And today I realized there’s another strain coming to the surface - listening to too much of that Franz Ferdinand album, perhaps, or just the pendulum swinging in a new direction. This next week or month may be Chord Month.
Currently I’m very fond of “Dreams” by TV On The Radio - there’s something winning about the cool, understated background and Tunde Adebimpe’s resonant baritone. It’s like Seal and Prince singing on a track by Nash The Slash. And I am ever a sucker for the counterpoint of two interweaving vocal lines.
I realize I’ve shied away from writing music that drones on one chord after another, in favor of a handful of melodies that mesh together. But I do love it - there’s a handful of older Stereolab tracks that do it beautifully. Probably why I was so big on Philip Glass in high school, too. You could compare that sort of writing to the mid-20th century abstract painters - the Colour Field and Op Art folks in particular. The best, I think, have chord progressions that force a surprising and dramatic shift in key somewhere along the line (like the I-VIb in “Dreams”)... which is the wonderful thing. A change in key is a change in context, a change in perspective. Suddenly a different set of notes is ‘permitted’.
A list of my favorite key changes would have to include that weird free-fall moment in Sting’s “Fortress Around Your Heart” when the chorus kicks in. Gives me chills, that one does.
Project: make maps of musical attractors. Vocal styles come in waves, like the neurotic, high-strung New Wavers (David Byrne of Talking Heads, Andy Partridge of XTC, all of Devo); the current vogue for hyper-melismatic vocals that emerged from ‘90s R&B style - and, by contrast, the uninflected, soaring tenor harmonies that seem to appear on every damn alt-rock tune these days. What other stylistic turns can be traced?
And along the same lines: what elements seem to hold a particular fascination for me? And what is it about them that is so beautiful? I’ve mentioned chord-chord-chord music and dramatic key shifts, and the zany springwound energy of XTC et al… but there’s plenty more to look at.
Monday 1 March 2004
I figured it was time I wrote some freakin’ music. To that end I’ve started a “song-a-day” project (inspired by a similar thing I saw on someone’s web site).
Ground rules: A piece of about a minute in length, every day; more, if time allows. Anything goes, from pop song to noise collage. If unable to make quota, finish a song, or get to the studio, for that matter, don’t sweat it. Also, rehearsing or jamming with other musicians counts as points toward Song-a-day quota.
What I hope to do is combine the best things from all the other methods of composing that I’ve used in the past. In particular, I’m thinking of the Frequent Mutilations I did at the radio station where I volunteered - hour-long soundscapes for a weekly program; I was one of about five regular contributors. The combination of deadline, limited sound sources (I had next to no instruments and effects; my chief weapons were DAT feedback, tape delay, hand-spliced loops and playing things at half- and quarter-speed) and limited time in a dedicated environment (four-hour blocks reserved in the production studio) seemed to be a real boost for my resourcefulness. Yeah, there were plenty of pretty dull moments in my Mutes, but there were enough cool bits that I compiled a CD of ‘em.
Doing a song every day means I have to work fast, and toss out the rules I tend to set myself otherwise - no recognizable samples, synth patches must be original-sounding, avoid clichés at all costs, and so forth. It also just plain gets me off my duff and writing. Scouring my piles of field recordings, my MP3 collection, my vinyl, for sounds to use. Browsing through the Cubase plugins for things I haven’t yet tried. Sounding out song melodies the way I used to do, singing nonsense words as placeholders and then forming them into something more cohesive. Probably most important: Working in broad strokes and leaving the finicky detail work for later.
Wednesday 28 May 2003
Sunday morning I dreamt I was writing a song. It was coming along so easily - I had something like two verses, a chorus and a bridge, with what seemed like pretty good lyrics - when I realized I was dreaming. I woke myself up and scrambled around for paper, and tried to get it all down in barely-legible pencil scratchings, working out chords in my head…
And then I woke up. Aw, dammit. I crept into the other room - inasmuch as we have another room in this loft, and found a tape recorder. Couldn’t find a blank cassette, though. Maddening. Bits of the song were fading, naturally enough - enough to make me start wondering if I actually had come up with a song, or just dreamt that I had the feeling of writing a cool song, when in reality it was all the neural equivalent of “lorem ipsum dolor sit amet”... meaningless and possibly completely derivative. Sean woke up at this point and came into the room, grumbling that the lights were waking him up.
I smiled at him, and noticed how beautiful he looked. And realized I was dreaming, and decided to see what I could do in that state - realizing on some level that this additional distraction would probably make me forget what little of the song I could still remember. And somehow I was floating above him, holding his face in my hands. And then it changed. He became, in turn, several different people, some male, some female, and of varying ethnicities… I was fascinated, because my dreams aren’t usually so vivid.
And then I woke up. At least I could get a bit of it down… one of the verses, maybe. I figured. Since I don’t actually own a working tape recorder, I tried to find my busted-up MiniDisc recorder and perhaps get some of the melody down rather than trying to write it on staff paper - something I’m not very good at.
And then I woke up. I grabbed the sketchbook I keep by the bed and a pen… but the only thing I could remember was completely unrelated idea I’d had along the way: a simple vocal line à la Stereolab (“Ca le le le, ca le le le,” it went). That was it.
But by now I was in a feverish state of wanting to write something. So I wrote for a few pages, fragments of lyrics or poems or whatever, turns of phrase and scattershot similes inspired by feelings or visual impressions I’d had along the way.
Maybe it’ll be useful in a song someday. I don’t frickin’ know. :D
Quoth a friend, when I told him this story:
Nested dreams??? Oh, I am never, ever, ever sleeping ever again.
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