https://soundcloud.com/thetryingartist/i-dont-know

When I made this song, I thought it was significantly better than the first two. It is, sort of. It definitely starts much better. In fact, I suspect there might be a couple of lost songs in between. Maybe I did it over a weekend instead of one evening, and bothered to fix some of the mistakes. Which is not to say there aren’t mistakes, god no. One of which being the fact that the sound is peaking the entire way through the song. Sorry about that. 

I like meta things. But sometimes I worry that artists go for meta when they have nothing else to say. When you’re sat there, ‘pen in hand’ (to this day I think I’ve written a grand total of five songs worth of lyrics by pen), and you can’t think of any words, your first thought is that you can’t think of anything. Which is why, when I’m writing a new song, and I’m improvising lyrics over a chord sequence to work out a melody, I often automatically sing the words ‘I don’t know’. In this instance, the words made it to the title.

Before I’m too disparaging of this song however, it has to be said that ‘Why do you think I’m not cool, have you seen my ipod?’ is one of my sassiest early lines. ipod as trendy consumer symbol- ipod as modern representative of the sum of a person’s music taste- music taste as signifier of cool. Sung with a nice knowing sarcasm- the emphasis on the ‘t’ of not and the ‘d’ of ipod.

Unfortunately that line is surrounded by quite a few renditions of ‘don’t ask me why I don’t go with the flow’, which is as bland as you like, and if it was also meant to be tinged with knowing sarcasm, I no longer hear it.

I remember receiving a comment from a girl I didn’t know on my Myspace music page at the time, which said something like: ‘Nice song, cool effect on your voice!’ This made me feel attractive, which I liked a lot. But it also made me doubt myself- was she aware that the effect was there partly to conceal the mediocrity of my voice? And more importantly, did she actually fancy me or not?