In 2011, Peter Falconer - musician, songwriter and lazy bastard - will be writing and recording a song a week for the whole year to raise money for Parkinson's UK!
So that's it - 52 songs in a year. I'm crying my bloody eyes out as I'm typing this, for goodness' sake. Exhausted.
In the next couple of days, I'm going to do a blog post thanking everybody properly, because if I try to do it now I'll end up missing people out and spelling names wrong.
So for now, let me just say thank you so much to everybody who's been following - everybody who's listened to a song, who's made a donation, given the Facebook page a thumbs up, re-tweeted a tweet, left a comment...
Now I'm going to go and celebrate the end of this bizarre and wonderful year with my wife, who's had to put up with more crap from me than I care to imagine!
So this is it, the penultimate song. Recorded the music yesterday evening - it's one of my favourite beats, but I don't think I've used it so far, have I? Pride In Mathematics is a similar thing, but not quite the same. Rushing has led to me totally ballsing up the compression on the lead vocals, I'm afraid - bit pumpy.
Now, lyrical content. "When all around has fallen" was the line that popped into my head first, so I started writing about a post-apocalyptic world in which society has completely collapsed, and people desperately cling on to the little things that make them human. But I got bored with that, and it kind of morphed into a comment on an argument my brother and I had while I was up north for Christmas. It got quite vicious. And the subject of the argument? Quite simply, it's because my favourite JamesBond actor is... TimothyDalton.
Unfairly maligned
What a bloody stupid thing to argue about. So the song's about people fighting over stupid things that really don't matter. I wanted to get a Dalton reference into the song, but it just wasn't fitting right... so I changed it to one of my other many unpopular opinions; viz. William Hartnell is my favourite Doctor Who. I'm not even into Doctor Who, really - but by Jove, I'll defend Hartnell to the death if I have to, which luckily I almost certainly won't. Of course, I could have changed that particular line to something more sensible, but I've done 51 songs this year - I'm not feeling very sensible at the moment!
Right, enough of this - I've got Song 52 to do before the clock strikes 12 and my computer turns into a pumpkin.
4 hours, this one took - writing, recording and mixing. Either I'm getting faster or I'm caring less and less about performance quality.
The chorus was something I had in my head upon waking back in July (the original recording of me mumbling it into my phone at 7am is amusing), but it was only this evening I came across it again. The rest of it's loosely inspired by the story of Harold Camping, the American radio preacher who wrongly predicted the end of the world earlier this year.
As I'm sure you'll understand, I'm very short on time now - so as I've not been able to trawl the net for suitable video footage, I've knocked up a quick drawing of Mr Camping. Looking at it now, I seem to have drawn an elongated George W Bush. Hell, I'm a musician, not Bob Ross...
"Hey, why don't you give the friggin' Mayans shit for once?"
The song's about a dame who ain't no good, no-how, and I was hoping to put together some sort of femme fatale montage, but I don't have time - so instead you've got a photo of Kim Novak. That'll do, right?
Second song to be recorded today, and I'm shattered. Just need to get as many done as I can before succumbing to this cold and/or going up North. No more time today, and tomorrow's stuffed, but hopefully I'll get one one more done by Friday night.
Tick tock tick tock tick tock...
In the meantime, enjoy this one - and don't forget to donate at either http://www.justgiving.com/songaweek or by texting "SONG52" plus "£amount" to 70070!
I wanted to give the Christmas song more time to breathe but there's no time for that! Ah yes, the sound of the annual Christmas cold creeping in - "Say By Dabe", I should have called this one!
We're heading up north to see my folks for Christmas soon, and while I can record up there (see Song 41 for the results of that), I'd rather spend the time lounging in front of the fire eating chocolate oranges
So here's song 48, inspired by the website of a "sales expert" who trains cold callers. It's one of the most nauseatingly smug sites I've ever seen - one look at it and you can feel the vomit rising - and that's even before you start pondering on the rather depressing notion that we now live in a society where a Cold Calling Trainer is even a necessary job.
"Song a week? YOU are weak!"
My first job was selling kitchens over the phone. It's impossible - people are either in the market for a kitchen or they're not; you can't persuade someone to drop a couple of grand on a new one, even if they have been "specially selected by our computer to receive a £500 gift voucher towards the cost..." Turnover at that place was incredible. I lasted three weeks, before I was replaced by a guy called Brad Cheesebrough.
But enough of that - got to get on with Song 49 now. Please keep your donations coming in by visiting http://www.justgiving.com/songaweek - and now you can donate by texting the code "SONG52" and the amount you want to donate ("£X") to 70070!
So, getting in early, this is my Christmas song for the year, inspired by my mother and uncle's good-natured attempts to annoy each other by furnishing the other's children/grandchildren with the noisiest presents they could possibly find. The alternative title for this one is "Revenge Is A Dish Best Served Loud," and I believe it represents what for many people is the true sound of Christmas - an almighty racket, braying your head in from the moment the kids wake up to find their stockings full, right through Boxing Day, and only stopping when you finally rip the batteries out of every electronic device except the TV remote control.
Featuring the lovely Jess as "Exasperated Mother"
Remember these little bastards?
Seven songs to go? How have I still got seven songs still to go?!
[EDIT: Oh no, hang on - it's only five. Ach, my brain!]
Still time to donate - you know the drill! I'm keeping the lines open til about half way through January, I reckon. http://www.justgiving.com/songaweek
I had two parts to this song - one was the atmospheric intro/first verse as you hear it; the other was something that sounded a bit Ben Folds Five-ish and I wasn't too keen. It just didn't fit - it sounded like I'd had two half-ideas and crammed them together (for a more successful attempt at this, check out that old hippie chestnut Something In The Air by Thunderclap Newman). So I removed the BF5 bits and wrote something else that seemed to fit a little better. I think it's still a bit bitty and directionless, but I do like the verse sections - the second verse in particular feels like it could be developed into something more interesting.
I never realised Pete Townsend produced this. So there you go.
The video is an advert for an American brand of coffee I lifted from the Prelinger Archives, a wonderful place to waste far too much time!The sex education videos are wonderful.
Tomorrow (or, rather, today) I'll be putting song 47 online, a song which promises to represent the true sound of Christmas...
No offence intended, of course, but this bit of fluff is dedicated to teenagers, people who have teenage kids, and everybody who ever was a teenager (especially me).
Words came first, then chords, then a beat, then I moved the beat around to make it more interesting, then changed the chords, then scrapped the words completely and wrote new ones, then simplified the beat because it was dragging (the original is still there, processed to buggery and just about audible in the intro/first verse)
If I had a pic of me as a sulky teen I'd have used it.
This isn't far off, though. Except I wasn't even cool enough
to wear a backwards baseball cap.
The inspiration for the final lyric came from a conversation I had with a teacher friend of mine about her having to hand-hold so many of her students (I don't have that problem, of course - all my pupils are lovely!), and our realisation that we were probably just as much of a pain in the arse at that age, as much as we'd like to forget it. The footage, by the way, is from The Educated Fish, Directed by Dave Fleischer in 1937.
45 down, so that's my original, scrawny weakling target met - just seven more to go and I'll be at the full-fat, gold-plated, big hairy bollock of a target!
Something a bit different. Someone suggested I do a Tom Waits style track, and this was what came out. I actually planned to do a Tom Waits impression with the vocals, but it just sounded too silly. Not a bad impression, if I say so myself, but it was still me doing an impression rather than singing in a more honest voice. Does that make sense? Anyway, this is just me, my voice, my piano, and an over-worked noise gate.
Here's Light To Darkness, a song which has proven an absolute nightmare to record - like so many other tracks this year, I had the song ready to go for what seemed like ages but couldn't get ten minutes together to record the vocals! And when I finally did, my computer had a hissy fit and recorded the whole lot with all sorts of digital glitches, so I had to re-do the lot today. But it's done!
Most songs you'll hear on the wireless can be split into three components - the verse; the chorus; and another bit. Here I've done two different bits, and tried to create a third by sticking the two together. Does it work? Or is it a mess? Who cares - it's another song down. Nine to go, and there's something else as well:
WE'VE DONE IT! Yes, folks, we've passed the £1,000 mark!
AAAADRIAAAAAANNNN!!!
I'm over the moon, particularly considering the original target was £250! Thanks to everybody who's donated, and everybody who's helped me out by telling your friends and colleagues, Tweeting and Facebooking. The people at Parkinson's UK are delighted, and on a personal level I can't quite belive I'm still going!
Now I know I've had a panic on lately over getting the songs finished, but you've kept your end of the bargain, so I'm now doubly determined to get the last nine done. Song 52 will be online on New Year's Eve!
I'd written the music, but was struggling to come up with something to write about lyric-wise. Andrew Nicholls, marvellous guitarist and singer with Earthtide, suggested "how about a song which cryptically extols the virtues of channel four at 3.30pm every weekday......."
Well of course everybody knows what's on at 3.30 on weekdays on Channel Four - Countdown. Great show. Horrendously addictive. And that got me reminiscing about sitting with my gran, watching possibly my favourite ever quiz show, Fifteen to One - it was on just after Countdown (or was it just before?) and featured William G Stewart asking question after question after question to fifteen contestants. No messing about; no 'hilarious' anecdotes about family holidays; no Brucie Bonuses and definitely no Michael Barrymore.
Wrote and recorded this in my father's studio on Sunday afternoon while we were visiting them up North.
Dad's studio, like mine, is what is politely termed a "project studio", which is a polite euphemism for saying no bugger else can get the thing to work, so I belted this out pretty sharpish to avoid prolonged arguments over the relative merits of Cubase and Logic.
There are some really lovely mics and pre-amps up there, and I'm very pleased with the sound of the (one take!) drums. If I'd had more time I could have (should have) spent longer on the bass and vocal sounds, but there you go. BVs were done sat in front of the computer with a hand-held SM57 for speed.
As far as the writing goes, I like the "across the ocean floor" line, but the mid 8 bored me so much I chopped a bunch of bars out of the middle of it and skipped to the end of an improvised rant about being sick of the sound of my own voice.
Song 42 coming as soon as possible, I promise. Thanks for all your donations and comments so far. Please keep them coming - these last few weeks are going to be really really tough!
Haven't really got time to write about this one. Nothing much to it, structurally; bit of a rush job. Noise in the intro isn't a turntable scratching - it's a Linn drum loop I programmed, sped up, gated, whacked through a ring modulator with a delay on it, mixed down, and pitch-shifted. Then the higher chords in the chorus are linked to it by a vocoder - thought it'd be nice to fiddle about with.
Quite pleased with my voice in the last section - it's better than it was this time last year.
From here on, I'm going to be doing what I can when I can, but unfortunately the work I need to do to pay the bills has caught up with me. 12 songs in 56 days? No problem.
Love 80s-type Electro-Soul; Hate Parkinson's Disease! Come on - donate generously at http://www.justgiving.com/songaweek Vocals, Linn LM-1 drums, piano, saw wave and a bunch of bells. As much as I enjoy doing tracks like Amenartas, Long Long Way and Lucky One, I also have a real fondness for minimal productions. I think it's growing up as a big Prince fan that did it - tracks like When Doves Cry, If I Was Your Girlfriend, and pretty much the whole of the Dirty Mind album are very bare in their productions, and these are tracks that would either excite me or, for some reason, give me the creeps.
It wouldn't take much to scare me, though. Terry Gilliam animations used to terrify and fascinate me, as did the video for And She Was by Talking Heads (Dir. Jim Blashfield, who did the same creepy things with Xeroxed photographs in Michael Jackson's Leave Me Alone).
Nooooo! Make it go away! Make it go away!
Anyway: to the song. The words were written before the music; though "Sleep reset me/feeling go away" came into my head with its melody fully formed.
The drums are all done with Linn LM-1 samples - the explosion sound that sits where a cymbal normally would is actually a handclap slowed down to a zillionth of its speed. I love the sounds of the LM-1, but it's hard to use them without making it sound like I'm trying to be Prince (at this point, my family will no doubt be shouting, "But you are!").
Get over yourself, Falconer
After putting the piano chords in, and then writing the melody, it all sounded perfectly pleasant, but not particularly interesting. I wanted something that would jar the ears, but sound intriguing rather than repulsive - and so I shifted the piano track along so each chord comes in slightly behind the beat. I hope it doesn't piss you off too much, but I just didn't want the track to sound too comfortable; the singer, after all, is in an uncomfortable, sleep-deprived, confused state.
So anyway, that's that. Let me know what you think, either here, on the YouTube channel, on the Twitter account (where I spend most of my time!) or on the Facebook page.
Yup, that's Donald Duck in the picture. And if you don't donate a few quid to Parkinson's UK, Donald will be most upset! http://www.justgiving.com/songaweek
Incidentally, while I mention Donald Duck, have a look at this great piece of Allied WWII propaganda - brilliant, and slightly disturbing:
But anyway, back to business. This track is an overproduced monstrosity - basically me trying to be Todd Rundgren. Rundgren is a fantastic musician - a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and producer responsible not only for some tremendous chart-friendly hits such as Prime Time (produced for The Tubes); Hello, It's Me (from his wonderful album Something/Anything) and the first Bat Out Of Hell album by Meatloaf and Jim Steinman... but also for a catalogue of work that's always interesting to listen to (the beautiful a capella album, produced nearly 20 years before we were getting excited about Björk's Medúlla), even if the experiments sometimes miss the mark (such as the one-joke-stretched-too-long With A Twist).
When you're this talented, you can wear what you want
Nowadays, Rundgren's still producing consistently interesting and listenable music, with plenty of tracks you feel are great even though you're buggered if you can work out why. As I mentioned in the last post, I was privileged to have got to see him at London's Jazz Café a few weeks ago, when he played one of the most relaxed, fun shows I've seen in a long time - despite what impressions you might get from the above photo, he seems to be a very funny guy who doesn't take himself all that seriously. Much like another favourite of mine, Frank Zappa, he's an artist who definitely rewards the time and mind-space you're prepared to give the music. Start with A Wizard, A True Star.
So yeah, millions of tracks; lots of overdubbed vocals; and a big, flappy Vistalite drumkit like his current drummer Prairie Prince. The guitar chords in the chorus, for example, are made up of three guitars, a synth, a clav, and strings. Daft.
BY THE WAY - I see from the little Feedjit thing on the side that I'm getting visitors from all over the place, day and night. Firstly, hello to you all! Second, while you're here, please leave your comments and maybe make a donation as well! We musicians crave attention and constant reassurance, you know...
DONATE TO PARKINSON'S UK AT http://www.justgiving.com/songaweek - if you don't, it means you like Parkinson's. *FACT* So this track was written in a few minutes, and the main purpose was to play around with the backing vocal sounds and try to convey some of the atmosphere of one of my favourite places in London. The title should give you a bit of a clue (HELLO!) as to where it is. It's a small staircase nobody seems to use, and it feels like one of the few places in the whole of the Capital that isn't covered by CCTV. Not that I want to get up to anything naughty there, of course - I just remember the wonderful feeling of calm that washed over me the first time I walked up it and realised I wasn't being watched by an electronic eye.
Doing all manner of prohibited activities...
The backing vocal noises have no effects on them other than a spot of reverb - I did a lot of waving my hands in front of my face, singing into a saxophone bell, and other ridiculous things, but it was a delight to be able to play around with noises like that again - I think part of me was inspired by a recent Todd Rundgren concert, at which he played this track from his "A Capella" album - Lost Horizon.
As I said in my previous post, I've been having trouble with this one - just found the backing so uninspiring and New Jack Swing-ish. Anyway, I plugged away at it, and came up with this, which is just a fun bit of nonsense. It's also the first time I've heard the word "Hinny" used in popular song...
Donations have been sat at that level for too long - we need to get a shift on if we're to reach this £1000 by New Year. Tell your friends about the site - send them a link to your favourite song - then donate at http://www.justgiving.com/songaweek
Song 37 is also finished - I'll let this one breathe for a bit and then get it up tomorrow or Monday.
NEARLY THERE! If this song made you laugh, donate some money to Parkinson's UK. If you thought it was in bad taste, it's not Parkinson's UK's fault - so donate some money to them anyway. Then feel free to send me a stiff letter.http://www.justgiving.com/songaweek
Right, then. Mr John Siely, a regular at the open mic sessions at The Guildford Tup, challenged me to write a song with this title. I said I'd perform it at the open mic two weeks later. Of course, what happened was I ended up leaving the song til the last minute, so this was written in the hour before I was due to go on stage with it.
And today, I was in no mood to argue with the technology in my studio, which was sulking about something, so it only took half an hour from start to finish.
On to song 36. And of course the gig - yes, the gig.
Plenty of parking at the Sainsbury's across the road (at least there was last time), and the station (National Rail and Northern Line Tube) is just around the corner.
The night also features Big Mamma's Door (excellent blues band) and Anna Phoebe (classic rock electric violinist. Yes!)
This is my favourite venue in the capital, with the best sound and a great atmosphere. The gig will also be streamed live on the internet at http://www.justin.tv/thebedfordlive
We'll be on pretty late (10 o clock start, we reckon), but get down early to see the rest of the acts, too.
COME DOWN and see my wonderful band - they deserve your support, because they're all splendid musicians. Don't believe me? There's only one way to find out...
We're almost there, guys - just another couple of hundred to go and we'll have hit our £1,000 target. Please, if you haven't already, do your bit and pledge a couple of quid to Parkinson's UK at www.justgiving.com/songaweek
As you know, I've been trying to write lyrics away from the studio, which is something I've struggled with for a while. I'm getting better, though - Me and The Morning and Fallen Down were both written before the music, and I'm quite pleased with both of them. This time I thought I'd try something that lends itself particularly well to blurring the poetry/music divide: the folk ballad.
Wanna buy some mandies, Bob?
So here it is, my attempt at an early Bob Dylan-type ballad. I wanted to tell some kind of a story, but couldn't really think of anything that grabbed me. In the meantime, I played around with the all-important first line. Once I'd got that, the story (or rather the situation of an old man waiting for a lift - literally) presented itself readily.
Recorded in one take, with the vocals through a Rode NTK and the guitar through an SM57 - it doesn't sound half bad, especially when you consider the strings are the self-same strings I boiled for Track 6!
We're almost there - but let's not get complacent! PLEASE DONATE SOME PENNIES TO PARKINSON'S UK NOW! justgiving.com/songaweek
So what's all this racket at the beginning about? Well, I had a drum beat playing on the computer, while at the same time importing a CD. Perfectly in time with the beat, the "Import Finished" noise sounded.
And that's about that, really. Transposed melody in the second verse - I like doing that.
