I wrote a lyric
And just when I wasn't expecting it, I just scribbled down some lyrics the other day. They weren't entirely out of the blue; the song itself is one I've been percolating for a bit, for my aforementioned concept album idea. I will keep the title to myself until I've at least recorded a rough demo, just to string you along a bit...
I'm not completely happy with the lyrics themselves at this point (they feel rather stilted and rhyming dictionary-ish to me, and overall read like I was trying too hard, which perhaps I was), but think they were heading in the right direction, so I'll see if I can buff them up before I let the song out.
This piece is unusual for me, because when I write songs I almost always end up coming up with the music first, whereas this time it's coming the other way round. It might be because I've had so little time lately to go near an instrument for any great length of time. I have a few chord and melody ideas, and am weighing up whether to try composing this song on piano, mainly because I'm not great at the keyboard and it might (paradoxically) make me think more about what music I'm writing, or lead me down a path I might not take were I holding a guitar.
Hope to have a demo of this song to share with you soon, anyway. It looks as if the "concept album" project might have started sooner than I thought.
Labels: conceptalbum, lyrics, music, songwriting
Interregnum
(or "here's a post while I wait for something worthwhile to happen that I can post about")!
Well, I sent in the OU assignment a few days ago (one more to go, and if all goes well, I'll have gained the qualification I'm working towards :-) ), so I allow myself a brief breather before heading back to the books. Well, to be truthful, a more sedentary period was forced on me the last couple of days, by what Robert Fripp in his diary might term a "Devil Bug" (high temperature, coughing up icky stuff, etc.), though I'm pleased to report it seems to have got bored and is probably looking for someone else to move on to.
Perhaps as a result, life feels as if it is taking a pause for breath itself right now—it's rather on the uneventful side this weekend, but I may as well fill you in on a couple of things while I'm here:
- My ongoing project to produce a set of backing tracks for Joy's children's musical educational activity sessions, is... well, ongoing. Joy needed two more songs for this weekend which weren't among the ones we demoed with my sister-in-law just before Christmas, so when I finished the OU assignment I went to the studio and quickly laid down the tracks. "Old MacDonald Had A Farm" ended up with an apt (albeit somewhat predictable) country-ish vibe, whilst "Cows In The Kitchen" developed a life of its own in the hour or so that I was laying it down—imagine Roger McGuinn jamming with Queen on "'39", and you have an idea of the direction it took...
- As you may guess, I have made no progress on any of my own material since writing about my intentions the other week, and it's probably time I just got the ball rolling. I could make a start by making a demo of the "title" track of the concept album, which has been pretty well complete in the writing sense for some time now (though I may change the final couple of lines to lead into one of my older songs, should I add it to the album sequence—maybe I'll record both versions and choose the appropriate one at the end). Watch this space.
- Time is also running out to commit to disk the first of my "cover-per-month" project songs, so the first one might need to be a "start of February" song instead of "January"! Unfortunately, for copyright reasons I don't think I'll be able to make these recordings generally available, but... well, if you really want to hear them, "where there's a will, there's a way"...
And the first song? It will be "Six String Orchestra", originally written by Harry Chapin (of "Cat's In The Cradle" fame), but probably better known for its inclusion in an episode of "The Muppet Show" (sung by Scooter in character as the song's eager student rock star). The challenge here will be playing the acoustic guitar and singing deliberately poorly (well, the second part should be easier ;-) ), as Chapin famously did when he played the song in concert (look on YouTube for video clips of this). Anyway, it's quite a fun song, and I think I'll enjoy playing the rest of the "phantom band" in the choruses!
Labels: childrenssongs, demos, life, music, recording, studio
Fun with a Futurama
Fear not—I'm still here! I've been submerged in my latest OU course assignment (which I'll be getting back to in a few moments), and have barely done any recording since the last post here nearly two weeks ago, so there's not a great deal to report.
OK, I have laid down a couple of tracks for Joy's children's musical activity sessions—for one, I added some electric guitar and bass guitar to one of Joy and Charlotte's keyboard-and-vocal tracks ("I'm A Little Teapot", if you must know :-) ) about a week ago. During this session, I plugged in a wonderful early-60s Hofner Futurama bass, which I've borrowed from a friend to play on a few tracks. It has real flatwound strings (instead of the roundwound ones you get on almost all guitars and basses nowadays) and a single neck pickup, and it is a joy to play, compared to "The Beast" (my Squier Precision Special 5-string). I should also add that my Christmas present is turning out very useful for my bass tracks!
Best of all, and partly because of the strings and pickup, the Hofner has this woolly, thuddy, slightly honky sound which you normally associate with mid-60s beat groups and Paul McCartney's basslines with the Beatles—-exactly why I wanted to borrow this bass for these particular tracks I've had in mind. It was perfect for my version of "The Wheels On The Bus" for Joy (as I mentioned last time, I was going for a Monkees-kind of "Last Train To Clarksville" approach), and I'm hoping to use it on a few more tracks before I have to give it back ;-)
Right, and now I really do have to get back to the study. See you next time...
Labels: childrenssongs, guitar, music
Kid's stuff
First off, it's looking like the covers recording project (from last time) may well end up being for immediate family and friends only (lucky them :-) ). I had an e-mail exchange with a singer-songwriter in the US who has done something similar, and he said that over there, if you record someone else's composition, you have to tell the organisation which collects songwriters' royalties, and cough up a fee for each copy which gets sold, downloaded, whatever. ("Well, duh!", comes the retort from the seasoned artists out there—hey, go easy on me, I'm new to this ;-) )
I imagine there's a similar arrangement here in the UK, and apparently it applies whether you're a million-selling artist or a dilletante bedroom musician, or whether you're offering it for free or charging for it. Methinks this will stay a little private project of mine, then—oh well, the practice will be good for me, and it might even spark a new song or two...
Anyway, I'm still doing some other recording at the moment: you may remember from a few weeks back, that Sidingsound Productions is busy on a set of children's songs for Joy's new programme of children's musical activity sessions. I now have a good number of tracks "in the can" (OK, on the disk) for that, and will probably be working on the others sporadically over the next couple of months. Ultimately, we think we'd like to try selling CDs of the songs, so the arrangements will need to be filled out and tidied up before then.
In the process, though, I must say I'm enjoying working on these tracks—even though these are children's songs, I'm approaching them not that differently from any other song I'd produce. Some songs are receiving a slightly different treatment than you might expect; I've arranged "The Wheels On The Bus" in a kind of Monkees style (sort of country-tinged folk-rock), and even borrowed a friend's wonderful old 60s Hofner Futurama bass guitar (with flatwound strings!) to get that "Last Train To Clarksville" sound.
Other songs are getting makeovers for these sessions, too: "The Ants Go Marching" has shades of Billy Bragg's "The Marching Song Of The Covert Battalions" (which nicks the "Ants" tune anyway :-) ), and "Johnny Works With One Hammer" dovetails two arrangements, inspired by Julia Plaut and The Wiggles' versions of the song.
I shall tantalise you with that glimpse of the future, and leave it at that for now...
Labels: childrenssongs, covers, music
Another (possible) project for the year
And in my continued determination to do more recording (and hopefully songwriting) in 2008, my latest idea to ensure I actually do this...
As far as possible, I am going to try and record at least one 'cover version' a month throughout 2008, partly to get me into the habit of recording, arranging and so on, and maybe to kick-start some new songs of my own.
I have a couple of candidates in mind already. To a great extent, I'm going to try and choose songs I like, but which I don't think are that widely known. If I do end up covering any more familiar numbers, I will try and perform them in a different way to the original(s), unless I really can't think how to do that :-)
Unless there's a copyright issue which makes it a risky prospect, I hope to post the tracks for free download here, along with some notes on why I chose the song, the techie stuff about the recording, etc. I may also limit the time period during which these recordings will be available from this site, partly due to the above issue, but also because I don't have that much Web server space to archive the audio files (and I'm not sure if I can upload material to the Internet Archive which I didn't compose myself).
So, keep an eye open for the first cover, probably within the next few weeks or so, and remember: these tracks may only be available for a short time, so jump in when you see them!
Labels: covers, demos, music, recording
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
