Sidingsound

Now here's a concept

(Bit of a long post, this one—don't worry, I might not write another for a few days, so this should keep you going...)

Yes, it's that time of year again—the dreaded "New Year's resolutions" rear their head for the traditional two weeks or so that most of us actually keep to them :-) And yes, I have a couple of my own, such as the feeling that I should probably start losing weight—I think Christmas tipped the balance, literally—but there's at least one resolution I've made in a rather broad sense:

2008 is the year that I will record and produce at least one album (if not—gasp—more than one).

Now, if you're reading this a year from now and you can't find any indication of such a completed project, then you have permission to "do a Nelson Muntz" on me ("Ha-ha!"), but as I write this, at least one new album in 2008 is definitely my intention. I can't promise that all the material will have been written in 2008, mind you, but at the very least I'd like to have a new set of recordings in hand, whatever I might actually do with them when they're finished.

Actually, that's one of the big questions in my mind: is there much point in making actual CDs of a recording project, as I'm not a gigging musician as such? My last set in front of an audience of any size was at the wedding of two of my friends in March 2006, and that was just two songs. Furthermore, with OU study, the day job, looking after my daughter and helping out my wife with her various work activities, I think the chances of me making it to any open mike nights in my area could be described charitably as "slight-to-'fuggetaboudit'", so maybe I have little choice but to embrace the mantle of "bedroom musician and proud of it".

Having said that, there's something about having your music on a physical object, which a digital download can't quite capture—maybe I'm just old-fashioned in that way, but then again I think we're just replaying the "vinyl-vs-CD" and/or "CDR-vs-cassette" ponderings of years past. At least with outlets like lulu.com, which makes it relatively easy for independent artists to sell both physical CDs and digital downloads, it seems I have a choice as to which format I eventually plump for (or even both).

But of course, I still have to actually produce the music first, and it's there that I'm pondering what path to take. I'm in (at least) two minds on this question; one idea is I could just write songs and accumulate enough for an album, but I suspect that won't be structured or goal-orientated enough to help me get going (or keep me going).

The other idea I am more seriously toying with, is a "concept album", which automatically makes me feel somewhat defensive when talking about it. Now, I'm not considering this approach to hark back to the heyday of the "genre" in the 60s and 70s—it's more to give me some kind of framework around which to start writing new material, without which I might find it hard to get started again after what's been a quite lengthy lay-off.

I don't want to give too much away at this stage, for various reasons (inc. not having much to give away yet, and the possibility I might not actually get far with the idea anyway, though I'll give it a good try), but here's the concept: a set of songs with the "arc" theme of one day in a road in an apparently sleepy English village, and a few of the people who live in this road. I envisage a couple of "undercurrents", such as whether the village really is as sleepy as it seems, a fondness for the English countryside (or at least a "townie"'s image of it), and so on.

At this point, I can imagine someone suggesting that Ray Davies took a similar tack with "The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society", and that came out before I was even born. But hey, even if my concept was more than superficially similar (and they are different as you press deeper—trust me on this), it's not a bad record to follow, don't you think? :-)

In fact, the album I'd more likely cite as an influence on my idea, is one of my "desert island albums": The Divine Comedy's second long-player "Promenade" (1994). It has a similar concept in some ways (a "day in the life", in this case of two lovers), and I really like the album's quasi-classical "chamber/baroque pop" sound (with lots of string quartet and oboe/cor anglais) which Neil Hannon never returned to once he could afford big orchestras from the mid-1990s onwards.

I actually sketched out the first song (which carries the same title as the projected album, though I won't reveal the name yet) back in the autumn of 2006—just as Ray Davies wrote the original song "Village Green" in 1966, two years before the rest of the album. I may try and work a couple of other existing songs of mine into the lineup, but others will have to be new compositions. A couple of ideas I'm toying with, both for songs and for characters in the "story", are:

• The vicar of the parish church, trying to write a sermon; to suggest the books in his study, the "lyrics" would be a long list of names from Church history (basically, a conscious homage to "The Booklovers" from "Promenade")
• A man who lived the high life in LA for a number of years (not sure yet what his job was, and maybe the detail is not that important), but who now lives quietly in this sleepy English village—song presented as a jangly, mid-tempo, Roger McGuinn/Tom Petty folk-rocker (something like McGuinn's "King Of The Hill", if you've heard that)
• The old wrought-iron lamp-post (!) in the small square at one end of the road, imagining what it would've seen over the decades (if it could see, obviously)

I think you can see roughly where I'm heading with this, although the final sound of the album may not be as heavily "classical" as "Promenade" was, mainly as I'd have to render any classical instruments with MIDI, and would have to write some convincing string/woodwind arrangements too. Not that either of those points would stop me or anything, but they're making me think about which direction I really want to take the project in.

There's also a mental image forming of an idea for the cover art: a photo of a typical English parish church, digitally processed to look like an old lithograph or pencil drawing. I picture the rest of the CD inlays as looking like an English parish church newsletter would've appeared before the arrival of home PCs and cheap DTP in the 1990s—typewritten text, literally cut-and-pasted and duplicated on a questionable-quality photocopier. I don't know if this can be "mocked-up" on a computer, or whether it would be necessary to actually produce the artwork that way (cutting/pasting, etc.), but it would be fun finding out...

So, that's an idea of what I've got in mind for the year—I wonder what I'll be writing in twelve months' time?

Oh: Happy New Year! :-)

Labels: music, recording, studio

posted by Tim @ 20:24