Trying desperately to think of interesting things to say about this song, I grasped at the idea that it might have the longest song title I’d written. A few seconds later I realised it doesn’t even have the longest song title so far on the Trying Artist blog (Pain Keeps The Pleasure Fresh just pips it with 25 characters to 24, and don’t even get me started on THE SONG THAT CHANGED THE WORLD). Right now I’m working on a song titled All Me And Everyone Else One Line Forever, for god’s sake.

Still, there’s always the tactic of talking about not talking about anything…

 

Don’t be fooled by the image or the name, this song is far more likely to send you to sleep than cause damage to your ears. And not just because it’s dreary, although of course that is a factor. It’s just a mellow song, one of the first sung by what I might call my Drifter persona- someone who, at the climactic moment of the song in the second chorus, sings the vague, non-assertive assertion: ‘I’ll be somewhere tonight, ahhh’. The vocals are mixed so far back it almost feels like an instrumental track. It seems to lurch from bar to bar like a drunk – ‘And I’m faaallling’ being perhaps more literal than it might normally be. In fact, I’m tempted to believe that the song was conceived as a ‘drunk song’ right from the start, although my dating would put its composition maybe between the 3rd and 4th time I ever tried alcohol.

The combined effect of these characteristics is that it’s quite hard to concentrate when listening to it, your attention drifts to more interesting things – the colour of the wallpaper in front of you, the thing you forgot to buy at the supermarket, are lower clouds actually moving faster than higher clouds or is it just a perspective thing? – before being wrenched back to the music whenever one of the quite irritating rhythmic mistakes happens.

When The Music Plays Too Loud definitely has a ‘feel’ to it though, in production terms. Recording my drum kit with only one mic meant that the quality/tone of the sound depended hugely on where I put the mic in the room. And not ever, in the 7 or so years it took me to stop recording my drum kit in this way, did I decide to properly work out where it sounded best. I’d do a bit of half-hearted shifting about, sure, but mainly I just wanted to get the song done. So, you’ll find across all of my early music, the drums are a lottery. Here though, they kind of work. There’s a dusty vintage sound to them, the kick drum cuts through quite well, there’s a good mix between the different drums and cymbals. I also like the way the kick drum and bass guitar play on the same beats through most of the song (when they’re not out of time.) And the chord sequence is interesting. If you wrote it down it would have numbers after the letters! In fact I just picked up my guitar and found that I can still play the whole thing, which means I must have liked it for a long time.

Ultimately, a song that is let down by the vocals (how many times will I have to write that), and, if we’re nitpicking, by my complete lack of professionalism. Will the next song also start and end with random noises? Find out later!