Working on Song 36

I'm once again at a point in a song's development where I've got a backing track sorted, but it's so uninspiring I'm struggling to find a melody to fit with it. 

Now comes the part where I stop layering up instruments and start layering up vocals, grunting sounds that might fit, and hoping they form themselves in to words and sentences later on.

What's not helping is that this track is so New Jack Swing-ish, and I can't stand New Jack Swing!

But not to worry - I'll come up with something.  And I can always take comfort in the fact that it can't possibly be worse than I Wanna Sexx You Up...

The wardrobe's even worse than the spelling!
Fuck me, the '90s were bleak.

Song Number 34: Ballad of a Slow Man

With apologies to Dylan fans everywhere...

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!

Secrets Of The Pop Song: more thoughts

The second and third programmes in this very interesting series are now online here, and you can read my musings on the first show here.

• What makes a song a hit? Boy George says "Airplay."  There's a lot to this.  One thing the programme didn't mention is the amout of money paid by record companies to plug their artists' records (or, indeed, get them onto BBC documentaries writing songs with Guy Chambers).  Lamont Dozier of Motown writing legends Holland Dozier Holland, on the other hand, says "I don't know - and I've had, like, 78 top ten hits."
• Another guilty pleasure (if harsh) from Boy George, who's actually coming across very well in this series (normally gets right on my wires): "People say 'Oh you've got to admire them because they've been so successful and sold so many records.'  I don't.  Arms dealers do well."
• Guy Chambers "has written over a thousand songs, and had 21 hit singles."  That's a 2% success rate, which puts things in perspective for whining songwriters like me who complain they're not getting their piece of the pie!  Indeed, while the radio pluggers were going wild about the Ballad from the first show, they were unconvinced about the Breakthrough Single from the second show, and weren't even shown commenting on the third programme's Anthem.  Both of those songs were good... but not great.  And this is from one of the UK's most renowned writers - but where he scores over others is that he'll keep on writing those fifty songs until he gets the one that works.  (Interesting moment in the third programme where after a day of pounding out three ideas with The Noisettes, he wasn't afraid to ditch all three and pound out another three ideas.  Excellent).

Deals with a 98% failure rate very well

• Is there anybody in the top 40 at the moment who isn't from a stage school, a reality show, or the loins of a record executive?  Nepotism's always been around, and of course A&R people are going to make stage schools their first stop, but the industry does seem to be more than usually saturated... or is that just me being jaded?  It'll be interesting to see what happens when the BRIT school's bubble finally bursts.
• Writing songs - jamming, making random sounds/words to find a melody
• Brian Higgins, ringleader of Xenomania, one of the best songwriting/production houses since Stock Aitken & Waterman (just Google them - fantastic track record, no pun intended) - group of half a dozen or so writers, with one decision maker.  Reminds me of Motown's quality control meetings...
• Round Round by Sugababes: piece of new music formed basis of the track; chorus was taken from a 2-year-old track written by Xenomania co-writer Miranda Cooper.  It's easy to get precious about songs, and see them as whole pieces; but if you have one song with a great chorus and nothing much else, and another song with a great verse and nothing much else, why not try and clag them together?

Tried to find a pic of the Sugababes' current line-up
but nobody knows who's in the group this month

• Rich Harrison, producer of (amongst other things) Beyonce's Crazy In Love and Amerie's One Thing, talks about starting with an instrumental, then "grunting" a melody over the top of it until it forms itself into something workable.  Seeing a pattern here?
• Group writing - Tawiah singing her melody/lyric; Chambers suggesting she changes the odd word, then adding his own counter melody.

Another argument breaks out over who wrote the mid 8

• Jessie J: "80% of my time is taken up with talking about making music, not actually making music."  Seems like a smart girl - reckon she'll be around for a while.  Incidentally, BBC, her career did not "start with writing songs for Justin Timberlake and Taylor Swift."  Nobody's career starts there!
• Quote of the series from Sting: "My critical factors are highly attuned." It's nice to know that as empires rise and fall, Sting will always be a complete knob. :o)

Sumner's Constant

Also on this week were a couple of shows about Ray Davies and The Kinks and a superb documentary on Harry Nilsson - watch it now if you haven't already!

Song titles

A lot of writers start with a song title, and that gives them an idea of what the song might be about, and therefore what sort of music would go with it.  Plus, it's an advertising line for the song.  If you're flicking through an album and you're faced with the following track list:

1. Breakup song
2. Love song
3. I love you
4. Captain Corelli's Buggered Off
5. Sad song
6. Song for my father

... which track are you going to skip to first?  Exactly. 

So where's a good place to find a song title?  Well, my current favourite source is newspaper columnists.   Newspaper headlines aren't always poetic enough (from various newspapers today: "Murdochs to Testify"; "Betty Ford's Son Eulogizes Former First Lady"; "Indonesian Volcano Erupts"; "Met Chief Under Pressure"; and, of course, "Brooking Good" - another story about Kelly Brooks in her pants). 

Columnists, on the other hand, and especially editorials, don't need to sum up the news story (the readers will already have read about it earlier in the paper), so they just have to sound enticing.  For example: "Fixing The Holes"; "The Sky Falls In"; "Fade To Grey"; "Absolved Of Blame"; "Wrong Target"...

But pick up any book and you'll find something.  Here are a few from a random page in Speak, Memory, the autobiography of Vladimir Nabokov: "Linden Avenue"; "Conventional Ghost"; "Persons Unknown"; "Some Mysterious Stranger"... or 1791 - Mozart's Last Year by H.C. Robbins Landon: "Rewrite The Second"; "Outside The Line"; "Language Misleading"; "New Intrigue"; "Dresden 13"... or even the classic Collectible Spoons of the 3rd Reich by James A Yannes: "Diamond Colours"; "Sleeping Carriage"; "For All Intents And Purposes"...

However, I have to say the award for greatest song title of all time has to go Joe Tex for the absolutely superb (and totally genuine) You Might Be Digging The Garden (But Somebody's Picking Your Plums).

I Gotcha!

BBC: Secrets of the Pop Song, part 1 (Ballad)

The BBC is currently running a three-part series called Secrets of the Pop Song, in which top UK songwriter Guy Chambers (more hits than you can shake a stick at, most famously providing the best songs of Robbie Williams' career) pairs up with a different artist each week to write a different type of song.

Spectacular doyle, Robbie Williams, who made the mistake
of thinking he was bigger than his songwriters

If you haven't seen it yet, check out part 1 here, in which Chambers writes a ballad with Canadian balladeer Rufus Wainwright.

As I was watching it, I jotted down a few thoughts:

• Starting with a title can give you the concept of the song, and the atmosphere of the music straight away, meaning you can streamline the playing around on instruments you do to find a suitable riff or musical style. 
  
  
• When I write a riff or a chord sequence, I follow my ear initially; but then I need to check whether the result is “comfortable” to the audience, or just predictable. Audiences sometimes like to be pleasantly surprised with where a song goes, but they don't like to be jerked around all over the place.
  
  
• Lyricist Don Black: “If you can recognise yourself in a song” then you're onto a winner. Very true. If a song's too specific in its lyrics, only people who've experienced that specific situation will be able to relate to it. If you make the words a little more general, boiling the song down to the basic emotion rather than the specifics of the situation that moved you to write those words, then more people will feel like the song “speaks” to them.
  
  
• Sting, along the same lines, talking about Every Breath You Take, which he intended as quite a bitter song about a troubled break-up, being played at people's weddings because other people hear a different meaning altogether. “It means whatever you want it to mean”.
  
  
  

  

  Ok, he's a bit of a knob,
  but he's sold more records than all of us.

  
  
• Boy George, saying it's easier and better to write from personal experience. I'm not sure that's always true, and I certainly don't think that it's best to write lyrics in the heat of the moment when an emotion's at its most powerful. Most of my songs are about my personal experiences, but they're almost always imagined or remembered a while afterwards, when I'm in a different mood; otherwise I end up being too specific (see Don Black section), or just too much like an angry teenager's diary. Also, look at Randy Newman, who writes superb songs often from a different character's point of view, not his own.
  
  
• Don Black again: artist-specific songs and in-jokes often make songs unsellable from a publishing point of view. A song that's too much like a Rufus Wainwright song (with RW being a pretty idiosyncratic artist) would be a turn-off for a publishing company, since they wouldn't be able to place it with anybody else on their roster (unless they happened to have a roster of Rufus Wainwright soundalikes, which isn't likely!)
  
  
• Radio scouts going mental over the final track. Of course they are – the show would have been a damp squib if the end product had been a flop, and also it's a well put together track. The quality of the recording, too, is excellent. I do wonder, though, if they would have been quite as excited if they hadn't known who'd written it...

This last point also raises a problem a lot of songwriters have, namely the quality of their demos. Nowadays, scouts aren't remotely interested in anything that's done on a dictaphone with just you and your guitar – the demo has to sound slick and well-produced; pretty much ready to broadcast as it is. It's a shame, really; a great song is a great song, regardless of the production quality. But with technology getting better and cheaper as time goes on, every songwriter potentially has professional studio-quality sounds within their budget, so of course the standard of demo production is going to rise; and it's only natural that a scout's ears are drawn more to a shiny radio-ready demo than a poorly-recorded sketch. 

 

Wonderbollocks Records do not accept unsolicited wax cylinders*

In the past I've had A&R people turn down my demos because my vocals weren't up to scratch – I was livid at the time, because I wouldn't have been singing the song on the final record, so what the hell does it matter what my voice sounds like? But that's the way the industry's working at the moment, so there's no point griping. If your vocals aren't up to the job, hire a singer. If your demos are getting returned because the production's not good enough, throwing a tantrum (as I've done many a time) isn't going to get you anywhere. It might not be fair; it might not be right; but it's how it's done.

*photo courtesy of Ohio State University

Song Number 26: Escape on Amenartas

HALF WAY THERE!

Come on, now - it's time to put your money where my mouth is.  I've been going at this for half a year now - not many people who start a song a week project get this far - surely that's worth a bob or two for Parkinson's UK? Please donate generously by visiting www.justgiving.com/songaweek or clicking on the widget on the top right there!


When you do something for a job that for most people would be a hobby - whether that's music, art or stripping - there are times when it feels too much like work.  So this song was made for me to enjoy my music again after a pretty gruelling couple of weeks!  And now, a long and tedious account of how it was made:

I wrote it yesterday at one of my student's houses, at her piano (thanks, Gill & Brian!).  Writing somewhere neutral without any distractions (Internet be damned!) really helped a great deal.  It was a beautiful, sunny day, which definitely influenced things.  As ever, the main piano riff came first - a bubbling 5/8 thing, which I like to think avoids the stodginess of 6/8 without being too jerky (see Seven Days by Sting or Take Five by the Dave Brubeck Quartet).

I wasn't sure what to write the song about, so I turned to my hosts' bookshelves for inspiration.  With them being keen on sailing, there were plenty of nautical books, one of which was Gypsy Afloat by Ella K Maillart, an account of one of the 20th Century's most celebrated traveller's years as a sea-bound hitchhiker.  One of the chapters was entitled "Escape on Amenartas", which grabbed me straight away.  Using that as a starting point, it was a pretty straightforward job articulating the fantasy that just about all of us have had at some point, namely sticking two fingers up at the rat race and buggering off to sail around the world.

I'm going to be a
MIGHTY PIRATE!

This morning was spent recording the track.  Basic piano track to map out the tempo changes in Logic; Drums; Bass... then before adding the main vocal line I started layering up the instruments in the mid sections such as the harp, guitar, sax and strings, as well as percussion (bongos; cabasa; maracas; clicks and other oral noises; and the back of an acoustic guitar in lieu of a cajon).  Lead vocal came next, which I double tracked in places, followed by oohs and ahhs for backing vocals. 

There's a line in there which initially I heard as a harmonic caused by something else (very quiet tremolo guitar part, I think), that sounded like a trombone... so I doubled it with a trombone sound.  I always think if you hear a note or a rhythm or a harmony that you've not actually recorded, but that's implied by other sounds meshing together, it's nice to add another instrument to pick it out - I figure it's the song telling you what it wants to say.  Ooh, that was a bit hippy of me.  Anyway...

The swelling cymbal sound (right at the beginning) was created by recording a cymbal crash, reversing a copy of it, and sticking them both together.  It takes a bit of tinkering to iron out the attacks and get a nice smooth sound, but it's worth it - half way between a mallet roll and a bowed cymbal effect.  Totally studio-created, but it's very pretty and I use it quite a lot in ballads like this.

Anyways, that's about that.  I like this one, and I hope you do too - please leave your comments here, on the Facebook page or even drop me a line through Twitter.  It really means a lot when I hear from people about the project.  I just can't believe it's been six months already!  Here's to the next 26 songs!

Paul Simon interview

Following the Graceland-esque style of the melody/lyric in song 20, I just wanted to post a link to a tremendous interview with Paul Simon (thanks to Steve Piggott for putting me on to this):


YouTube Link

It's the first of seven videos, so take the time to go through them.  In the interview, he briefly describes how he got started in the industry, but the bulk is taken up with him talking in great detail about his songwriting process.  I'm delighted to say that it's very similar to how I write songs - though as of yet I haven't written anything as good as Bridge Over Troubled Water.  It's very organic, often starting with a simple chord progression and lyrical phrase, and then seeing what images present themselves.  The song is allowed to grow in its own way, though occasionally it needs a little pruning (if, say, a rhyme/image/chord change comes up that's just too obvious).  I particularly like his comments about keeping the audience interested by avoiding clichés but also making sure they're comfortable and aren't struggling to find, say, a beat they can tap their foot to.

Paul Simon will also be playing the title role in
"The Mel Brooks Story" on Hallmark

There's a lot of Paul Simon's output that's not to everybody's taste - not even to mine - but he really has written some tremendous tracks - Cecilia, Still Crazy After All These Years, Bridge Over Troubled Water, 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover (how many times has Sting ripped the verse of this song off?), You Can Call Me Al, Hazy Shade of Winter...  If you haven't heard the Graceland album yet, you really should check it out - some wonderful melodies, and fascinating lyrics.  Also responsible for some of the worst drum sounds on record, but let's not worry about that.

Before I move away from the Paul Simon thing, I'd just like to point out something on the Bridge Over Troubled Water album cover.

If you cover Paul Simon's face, it looks like Art Garfunkel is sporting an enormous handlebar moustache.  Call me childish, but it never ceases to amuse me.

WEBSITE UPDATE

On the Just The Songs page, for ease of browsing, the song titles are accompanied by an approximate description of their genres .

Song Number 11: Let Me In

Just in the nick of, once again, here's the latest:

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I always tell my students, if they need to make excuses for why a particular recording was below par, they shouldn't publish it- they should keep working at it until it's right and then publish.  Unfortunately, the weekly deadline has forced my hand, and so I've had to put this up despite my snot-infused sinuses!  Not that I'm making excuses or anything...!

This song started with the title, Let Me In.  Then the four main clav chords, which were originally in C, but then I realised that Song 10 was also in C, so I dropped it down to B flat.  Next came the second set of chords and the melody line for the title.  After that were the drums (wanted a breakbeat type affair, and I ended up stripping a lot of the original beats out to thin the sound out at the beginning and give the track more dynamic), and the bass.

Had fun with the production on this.  The slide down on the bass is actually me making that noise and recording it with an SM58 stuck up hard against my throat!  The string sound's been put through noise gates and limiters, then time stretched and compressed to break the sound up a bit.  The sampled beat at the beginning was a lot mushier, so I attacked that with a noise gate and limiter.  Put the clav through a pitch-shifter, tremolo and bit crusher in the "up" sections and the outro, too.  What I'm trying to say is I wanted to mess the sounds up a bit to try and make them sound a little less like off-the-hook sounds, even if that meant they didn't sound particularly pretty!  Check out some of Dave Stewart's productions for this.  The sax sound in Thorn In My Side, for example - horrible, but it doesn't sound like any other sax that's ever been recorded, either; so it sticks in your head.  And it's in addition to a great song, rather than just an annoying noise that's been put in to detract from weak songwriting.


I find starting with a title helps, sometimes, to give my songwriting - and especially the lyric - some structure, rather than just aimlessly shouting words at the monitor in the hope that somehow they'll fit.  It doesn't matter if the title means anything or has any particular connotations - it's just a hook to hang things on.  I've written a lot of songs like this, and the practice came from the need to save new songs with a name when opening them in Cubase (I now use Logic).  I'd give the new, unstarted song an arbitrary name, and then when it came to writing the lyric, sometimes that title word/phrase would find its way into the song; sometimes it wouldn't.

I'll write more about this sort of thing another time.  Right now, I want you all to donate, pass the link to the blog around to your friends, re-tweet this post, and do everything you can to help me generate interest in Song A Week 2011 so we can hit this £1,000 target!

Songwriter Spotlight: Diane Warren

Last post I talked a little about one of my influences, Harry Nilsson, a man who rarely seemed to stick to a formula, and whose maverick style was both the making and the breaking of him.

He had success as a songwriter with One (Three Dog Night) and Cuddly Toy (The Monkees), but while his songs were (in the first half of his career) generally delightful, and sometimes great, they were often without any sort of commercial potential, and it was his voice that really made Nilsson a star.  Like Randy Newman, one of the truly great popular songwriters, he had a tendency to subvert his own material with his off-the-wall and quite dark humour.  Newman once said:

"If I could write “I Love You Just The Way You Are,” I’d have been happy to have done it. But I would have written the whole thing, and at the end, I’d have gone, “you stupid bitch,” and blown my chances."

One person, though, who seems to have always resisted the "quirky" and got stuck into the business of songwriting is Diane Warren.

She is one of the big influences behind why I chose to write a song a week, rather than any other fundraising activity.  This is a woman who, by all accounts, works from 8am til 6pm, five or six days a week, just writing songs.  It will generally take her a week to finish a song, from the first words/notes to the final demo recording, and she appears to be a total recluse with little social life, who never gigs, and rarely gives interviews.  But look at the results:

• Unbreak My Heart (Toni Braxton)
• Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now (Starship)
• If I Could Turn Back Time (Cher)
• I Don't Want To Miss A Thing (Aerosmith)
• Because You Love Me (Celine Deon)
• Don't Turn Around (yes, the Aswad one)
• How Do I Live (LeAnn Rimes or Trisha Yearwood, whichever you prefer)

And so on and on and on.  Don't Turn Around, incidentally, was one of the big songs in my childhood - I just hated the fact that the singer wasn't fighting for his love to stay with him, even though it was clear he still wanted her.  Really stuck with me.

These are great songs.  Hardly any of them are my cup of tea, to be honest, but they all work beautifully.  Some people get sniffy about people like Diane Warren, saying the songs are "formulaic" or that they all sound the same.  Bollocks.  Just about every song is written to some sort of formula, even if it's in reaction to one.  I'll write more about formulas another time. And these songs aren't all simple I-IV-V chord progressions either - the chord changes in How Do I Live, for example, are ingenious, changing key from verse to bridge to chorus without you realising what's happened; no clunkiness at all. 

And as for the accusation that they all sound the same, I'd say that Warren is one of the smartest songwriters around.  By honing her craft, working on songs she loves and that mean something to her, she has made herself the go-to woman for this sort of track.  If she wanted to start writing electropop floor-fillers, I'm sure she could, and she'd probably do it well... but there are other people around who are doing it better, and Warren knows that.  In the meantime, she's made this sort of song her own.  You know you're a great songwriter when somebody says "We need a [your name] type song for the album".

It's not easy to write a song that's clever, effortless and accessible all at the same time such as Don't  Turn Around or How Do I Live.  At some point this year, I am going to try and write a Diane Warren type song... and I bet I won't be half as good at it as she is!

Song Number 10: I Should Be Here

TEN SONGS!  We're into double figures, folks!

And now, PLEASE donate a few bob to Parkinson's UK by clicking on the widget in the top right, or visiting justgiving.com/songaweek.

BEFORE I TALK ABOUT THE SONG, I'd like to say a massive thank you to everybody who came along to the Water Rats gig on the 9th.  It was a great success on the night, but I need you all to do me a favour and, as Batman once said, TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT ME!  If we're going to reach this £1,000 target, we're going to need all hands on deck.

Now, the song.  This one was written and largely recorded in the early hours of this morning after eating a large takeaway in front of a documentary about Harry Nilsson.

 Nilsson is one of my biggest influences as a singer and songwriter.  When he was in his prime, his voice was just beyond compare; and his best songs wouldn't have disgraced Lennon & McCartney.  Even if you've not heard of him, you'll have heard him - "Can't live, if living is without you..."; "Everybody's talkin' at me.  I don't hear a word they're sayin..."; "One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do..."; "You put de lime in de coconut you drink em both up..." and so on and on.  For the uninitiated, I recommend you check out the albums Nilsson Schmilsson and Harry.  The former was the biggie that made him a star, beautifully produced by Richard Perry; the latter is a slightly earlier album that sounds like what music might have sounded like had Rock n Roll not come along - it's one of my 5 favourite records, and if you don't absolutely adore at least one track on there, you simply have no heart.

He was a flawed man, bent for whatever reason on sabotaging his own career, and could be a bit of a bastard when he wanted to be... but he was also capable of this.

Song Number 8: End Of The World

For those of you about to drill, here's a song about Bruce Willis in Outer Space;

Special thanks to Alex Creese for providing the solo.

You like it?  You don't like it?  Either way, thanks for listening - but please drop a couple of quid in the Parkinson's UK tin, either by clicking on the widget on the top right, or by visiting Justgiving.com/songaweek.

Local stoner rock band Earthtide are well worth a look.  A trio of excellent musicians, playing music somewhere between Deep Purple and Black Sabbath, in amongst the set is a song about Jaws called Bigger Boat.  Superb song, and it was suggested by some fool that they do a song about Armageddon next.  Despite never having seen the damn film, I volunteered to write it for them.  This meant watching it.  Hell's teeth.  I'm a fan of Bruce Willis, and Steve Buscemi's never played a bad role as far as I know... but this ye-har, gung-ho, slack-jawed, GO AMERICA! nonsense peddled by Jerry Bruckheimer gets right on my tit ends.  I really am suffering for my art here, guys.  Just hope nobody asks me to write a song about Gigli or Catwoman.  Still, it passed a couple of hours.

In writing the song itself, I had to come up with a riff that sounded Earthtide-ish, but at the same time different enough to warrant a place in their set.  If it sounded exactly like another one of their songs, why would they bother playing it?  I think the verse and solo riffs sound pretty authentic, but the change comes in the chorus, which is much more American and Foo Fightersy than the rest of their set - which kind of fits in with the All American Action Movie premise, I guess.  The words are made up almost entirely from lines in the film, though I couldn't quite get the line "I have repeatedly asked you to call me dad" in there.  And the line "My daughter can't act" might have been my own...

Anyways, the band themselves seem to be pleased with it - let me know what youse think, and SPREAD THE WORD!  The donations have stalled again, and we need to get this site passed around widely as possible if we're going to meet this target. 

I'll be shouting it from the rooftops at the gig on Weds 9th March at The Water Rats, King's Cross (get there for 7.45!) 

Song Number 7: Waste Of My Time

That's me finally caught up - seven songs in seven weeks!

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Exciting stuff this week: you've been spared my voice, as all vocals were done by my wife Jess!

I hadn't set out to write a song for a female singer.  The song developed from a drum beat inspired by The Meters, then a bass line to go with drum beat.  Around the same time, I was twiddling with a marimba sound on the keyboard, and just stuck the one on top of the other. After that, it was a case of simplifying the drum beat to make the track drive forward a little more, then layer up the instruments like they were going out of fashion.  Sometimes I know exactly what I want to put into a production (the harp/strings in the chorus, for example); but other times I'll listen back to a track and hear some harmonics or an accidental emphasis on a particular note I like, then go back and record an extra instrument to highlight these natural accidents.  The creepy harp glissandos in the second bridge section are a nod to The Sixth Door from Bartok's opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle, because it's one of my favourite operas and I'm a pretentious bore.

Arrangement-wise, we've been working through a box set of James Bond films lately, and I wonder if that's had some influence on things!  Have you ever heard a-ha's version of The Living Daylights and then listened to the record after John Barry got his hands on it?  Totally different songs, and the bombastic orchestration really lifts it above being an otherwise unremarkable production. 

The first vocal line to pop into my head was the basic hook of the chorus.  Writing the words for the fast verse at the beginning was the toughest part - sometimes the words you want to use initially don't roll off the tongue particularly nicely, so you have to find a way of getting the meaning across while keeping it pleasing to the ear.  When I started to write the fast section, I thought it would be cool to hear a female voice performing it, and that gave me a clearer idea of what the character of the singer would be, and that the 'story' of the song would be: boy sees girl; boy likes girl; girl likes boy; boy too scared to do anything about it; girl gets bored.  We've all been there, chaps!

I had great fun recording with Jess (thank you!) - please leave your feedback on the song, the production, the singer... but most importantly PLEASE DONATE TO PARKINSON'S UK by clicking on the JustGiving widget up there on the top right!  Tell your friends and family - shout it from the rooftops!

Song Number 6: Boiling Strings For Jesus

Ok, there's a story behind this one - bear with me.

I actually planned to put a totally different song up tonight, but at the last minute I decided I wanted to do a completely different vocal arrangement.  However, my resident female vocalist (Mrs F) is out tonight, which has left me unable to carry on with that song at present.

So I thought I'd see what I could do in an evening.  I hadn't done anything major with the acoustic guitar due to a) the guitar having five manky strings; and b) my guitar playing being generally awful.

I grabbed a set of strings off the shelf, and made a start on re-stringing the guitar.  Two strings in, I realised the set was (for some reason) short of a G string, so I had to take the G string off the set I was replacing and boil it.  For those of you who don't know, the life of an old guitar string can sometimes be extended slightly by boiling the string in water (and a bit of vinegar, if you like), which removes a lot of the build-up of dead skin, dust and sweaty mush. 

While watching over the stove, the phrase "Boiling Strings For Jesus" popped into my head.  Which of course left me wondering who would do such a thing.  The answer, of course, was an old Pastor, nearing the end of his life, wanting to dust off his old guitar and play just one last song for the man upstairs.  I don't believe in God, myself, but I thought it was quite a sweet image.

Despite the comedy accent, I'm not taking the mickey out of anybody, nor am I trying to make any kind of a point - it's just a song*.  And writing it was quite interesting:  straightforward chords; simple structure and rhyme scheme...  It's nothing clever, but it was good to just pound out a song in a couple of hours.  The question is - how simple can I make my songs from here on without them sounding too formulaic.

AND NOW, FOLKS - it's time to chuck a bob in the ol' JustGiving account up there on the top right!  Tell your friends and family, too - who knows what the next song's going to be like!  Songaweek2011 - it's a riot!


* Great tradition of comedy songs in Country music, though with as with a lot of comedy numbers the titles are often funnier in isolation:

"How can I miss you when you won't go away?"
"If the phone doesn't ring, you'll know it's me"

"I’m sorry I made you cry, but at least your face is cleaner"
"If my nose was running money, I’d blow it all on you"

Experiment

I usually start writing a song when a hook pops into my head, usually consisting of just a few words sung to a particular melody.  I'll drone on about this some more at a later date.

But when I don't have a hook to build from I tend to write the music to a song first, and add the lyric later.  This can be a problem.  I'm hard to please when it comes to writing my own lyrics - for me, the line between too cheesy and too obscure is very fine indeed.  It's an aspect of my songwriting I really need to improve, and so for this next song I'm going to try writing the words first, away from the music. 

I don't think I've tried setting words to music since I was doing my A-Levels. It might work; it might be a total disaster.  WE SHALL SEE!

Song Number 3: Best That I Can Be

Here we go! 

I've done my bit - now it's time to do yours!  Click on the JustGiving widget up there on the right, and pledge some pennies to Parkinson's UK!

What an absolute nightmare I've had with this third song.  I work on one idea, get nowhere, and move onto another idea.  Then I get hacked off with that one and move on to another.  I realised today that if I was going to get anything done at all, I was going to have to pick one idea and stick with it until the whole thing was written. 

With time getting on, it made sense to go with the song that would take the least production time, hence the one-man-and-his-piano arrangement this time around.  No banjos here.  

So what have I learnt this week?  Well, if I'm faced with several song ideas,  none of which inspire me, it's best to pick one and hammer it out.  As much as it hurts a songwriter's pretentious artistic pride to say it, a mediocre song is worth more than a great idea that never gets realised. 

OH - while I'm here...

... donations have stalled somewhat, so I need you guys to help me spread the word!  Pass the link around; Tweet, re-Tweet, and Thrice Tweet using the button on the top right or by following my Twitter feed; add a link to your own blog if you have one (I'll happily link yer back).  And on a personal level, please leave your comments on the songs, either here, on the YouTube page, or the Facebook page - it means a lot to hear your thoughts on the tracks.

24/1 update

Nothing's working.  Most annoying. 

As I've said several times before, one of my aims with this thing is to get over my normal routine of:

1. Work out idea/riff/chords/beat
2. Get bored with it/feel totally uninspired by it
3. Give up

I must gone through this at least half a dozen times today.  The trouble is that my aim of just getting the song written is being counteracted by the fact that these songs are being posted online for everyone to hear.  I'm a vain and insecure musician, and therefore I need everybody to love everything I do all the time.  This is why musicians are so annoying to be around.

I need to get over this worry.  Even if I only posted songs I thought were good, that wouldn't be any guarantee that anybody else would like them.  Similarly, just because I think a song's dull and unimaginative, it doesn't mean anybody else will agree with me.  How many songs are there that have sold millions, yet when you hear them you think, "How did anybody fall for this crap?!"

So basically, I need to stop worrying and just get the songs written.  Or, as my dad would say, "Shit, or get off the pot." 

Song Number 2: Long Long Way

Does quarter to one on Wednesday morning still count as Tuesday evening?  Come on - be nice!

In any case, I'm proud to present the second song of the year, "Long Long Way".  Amongst the instruments used was my cigar box guitar (also featured on Country Life), and Jess added some BVs too.

I've done my bit - now do yours: click on the widget in the top right there to donate a few bob to Parkinson's UK!  THANK YOU to everybody who's donated so far.


I had great fun recording this.  The initial banjo riff and the line "Long way to go before I lose my soul" came first more or less simultaneously, and the rest of the song grew from there.  It took a few attempts to get it right - at first It was basically the same thirty-odd seconds of music repeated over and over again, but I forced myself to do something slightly more interesting with the "Citadel" sections until it became a whole song rather than just a riff endlessly repeated with no direction.

I had a spot of bother with the last line.  I wanted to say "You will never take my tea," but felt like I had to say something a bit more sensible than that.  However, nothing else seemed to fit, and so I said bollocks to being sensible and put the original line back in - and let me tell you, folks: it's sung from the heart.

Bear with me!

January being stuffed with birthdays and new students, I'm afraid today's been the first time I've had to work on the song properly.  Got to record a whole load of backing vocals (such as they are - I'm still really snotty) so the song won't be online until tomorrow evening, folks. 

If all goes to plan this week, I should be able to get song 3 finished by this weekend, which means I'll be back on track.  Things start to calm down again in February, which means I'll finally be able to:

a) give these songs a little more attention than they've been getting so far;
b) get to the gym;
c) scratch my arse.

Tomorrow evening - I promise!

13/1 update

My wife and I have our birthdays this week and we're disappearing for the weekend, which means song 2 won't be posted online until Monday evening, folks.  However, I can reveal it's a White Stripes-esque swamp stomper on which I'm tempted to play the flute. 

Thanks for your comments on Wears The Soap - keep 'em coming - and for your donations to Parkinson's UK.  Remember, you can donate in bulk, or just pledge a few bob after every song. 

I've also had a few requests for songs already - if you want me to write about a specific subject, drop me a line and I'll try to get them written. 

Song Number 1: "Wears The Soap"

We have lift off!  

Due to January being a pain in the arse, today is the first chance I've had to actually do some recording, so I made the most of it.  Written and recorded in five hours, I present to you the first song of my Song A Week 2011 project, "Wears The Soap."  Make of it what you will - I'd be interested in your comments on what you think of it, and what the hell you think it might be about!

I've done my part - now it's time for you to do yours: click on the widget in the top right to donate to Parkinson's UK!

I'm really pleased with this first track.  I don't think it's a particularly good song, but one of the reasons I started this project was to get over my nasty habit of starting a song, getting upset because it's not Life On Mars or Heart Of Glass and giving up. 

So here, I started writing the music; had a couple of tantrums, but kept going, finished the music and started on the words; had another tantrum, but kept going; and before I knew it I had a finished song and could start having fun with the production.  Thanks must go to my wife for giving me a stern word after my second hissy fit!