Uncategorized

When The Music Plays Too Loud

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

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!

Open The Door

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

The difference in quality between Open the Door and the previous number, of which no more will be spoken, is so pronounced that I assume either some attempts have gone missing, or the dating has gone wrong here. However, this song does have three telltale signs of my early music: lyrics that don’t make sense, a huge mistake in the playing towards the end, and that genuine mark of early Trying Artist authenticity – the computer mouse scrape-and-click.

What is clear is that at around this time I started improving. The general sound of the production sounds instantly crisper, the instruments are played a bit less badly, there are harmonies(!!!), there are fewer mistakes.

Musically, the song is significant in two key ways. The first is that the bass playing is quite good. The chorus features perhaps my most complex bass line, recorded inconveniently quietly so that it’s extremely difficult to hear unless you remember how it goes. Do you? This may mark the highpoint of my relationship to bass, when I considered it to be as integral as the drums, and had weekly lessons with a certain Mike who would make me play the same groove for 15 minutes straight while he went off into a jazz solo dreamland, which could be inspiring, intimidating, and quite long. Maybe a year after this song was made he went off to be (apparently) a successful double bass player, and I gradually began to only play the bass when recording.

The second is the use of the E major open chord shape, moved up and down the neck of the guitar. This was a very easy way of playing chords with complex names that I didn’t understand, except that they sounded good, and I may have used it to write five or six songs over the years. In fact, it’s still usually the first thing I play when I pick up a guitar. It’s built into my muscle memory.

Ultimately though, I feel nothing for Open The Door. It’s a bit insipid, don’t you think? I remember being proud of it, especially the chord sequence, which is longer than any I had written previously, and the drums, which certainly sound planned in the sense that there’s a different groove for each section of the song and I don’t just start solo-masturbating at the end. But the lyrics annoy me – as in a few other songs, I seem to have had an idea (something about opening up, speaking your mind, not being preoccupied with your own thoughts) and mixed it with other things (a breakup song, and, paradoxically, the sort of love-affirming lyrics you find in shit dance music: ‘Now we’re here and it’s my life. It’s what I want and I’ll show you now. Can you feel it, it’s coming near. Will you stay don’t try and disappear.’) It’s insipid.

Anyway, we’re placed somewhere in 2007, and we’re moving onwards and upwards.   

 

Pain Keeps The Pleasure Fresh

~ tryingartist ~ 2 Comments

https://soundcloud.com/thetryingartist/pain-keeps-the-pleasure-fresh

I have genuinely been dreading this moment. As soon as the idea to create the Trying Artist archive crossed my mind, I remembered this song and wondered whether I should skip out a few really dodgy ones, just to keep the pride somewhat intact. But, as the title truthfully suggests, pain keeps the pleasure fresh, so here it is: My Least Favourite Song By Me.

The whole song seems designed to prove its central point – by the time you have suffered through it, doing almost anything else will doubtless bring you waves of euphoria. Simply going through each aspect of Pain Keeps The Pleasure Fresh and disparaging it wouldn’t tell you anything you don’t already know, so I’ll keep that part brief:

The lyrics can be summed up by the eponymous line (a ferociously irritating one, especially when sung like that, by someone like me) and one towards the end: ‘I know ow’ll know how you must feel’. Yes that word is spelt correctly – I clearly was either improvising lines or I messed up the take and couldn’t be bothered to go back over it.

There’s some kind of half rappy/shouty bits which are awful.

The rhythm section is a fucking mess.

It gets worse as it goes on.

There you go. What’s more interesting is the question: How serious was I being with this song?

It’s tempting to look back 9 years and go: ‘God! How naive! How stupid! What an untalented pretentious weird arrogant bad musician with terrible ideas and worse execution I was!’ We all have those moments. But when doing that we seriously underestimate our younger self’s ability to understand what isn’t good, to create things that aren’t serious, to create things that are ironic.

Part of what I find interesting about this project is that I have a famously bad memory (ask anyone), and yet I’m presented with huge numbers of concrete records of myself from different times stretching across years. I can no longer remember my motivation for making this song. I can remember the development of my reaction towards it as I got older (sharp distaste by 1 year post-production, downturn to shame soon after) but not that initial buzz of inspiration. Was it another Muse-inspired melodramatic moan? Was it designed as a joke from the outset? Did I lose interest halfway through, thereby turning a bad concept into a worse final composition? I suspect it might be the latter, but I’ll never know for sure.

When I listen to songs like Pain Keeps The Pleasure Fresh – songs that I can’t relate to at all now, it really feels like I’m listening to someone else singing at me.

Well, it would do, if the tight knot of embarrassment in my chest didn’t constantly remind me who made it.

In The Silver Light

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

https://soundcloud.com/thetryingartist/sets/in-the-silver-light

 

A love song in disguise, In The Silver Light pays tribute to two years of cinema dates with my first girlfriend. Deliberately picking the worst films around so there would be fewer people in the audience. The beginnings of sex. Fighting, not knowing what to say, the tension surrounding almost anything involved with sexual relationships at that age. And a healthy dose of lyrics that don’t really mean anything.

But it’s also about something else more interesting: the feeling of losing yourself in something larger. Whether it’s watching a film, listening to music, experiencing art in any way. Sometimes you can feel your own life fade for a short while as you become enveloped, and at these moments you are completely relaxed, or excited, or inspired – they are moments of total sensation.

The one line that stands out for me is ‘when it goes black and normal life returns in a daze I stand up and walk to the door’. Something that has always stuck with me is a kind of unease with the moment the film, or gig, or anything else ends, and my life seeps back around me. I’ll be asked what I thought of the experience. I’ll be forced to express myself. Things that normally come naturally seem unnerving after the ego has been subdued temporarily by an exterior effect. I listened to this song today after having spent a couple of hours trying to write lyrics about exactly the same thing, and suddenly I was immersed in memories of the darkness, and the tension, and everything seeming very important.

In The Silver Light was meant to be a good song. It has the first ‘groove’ in any of my compositions, with a bass line so catchy I recycled it years later. It also has an early example of the ‘drone singing’ (staying on one note, fast paced lyrics) I now predominantly use when writing singing parts for myself. The lyrics, when they make sense, are probably a step up from any earlier songs.

Its fatal flaw, however, is that it’s just really quite annoying. Why am I singing too low for my own range? (I can answer that question: obviously because I wrote the bass riff first and couldn’t be bothered to change the key.) The effect of the strain on my voice is that forced attitude thing that makes me cringe so much when I listen back now. And it becomes increasingly messy as it goes on, ending in classic style with a collapse of instruments – drummer moving arms as fast as possible in uncoordinated style, while the rest of the band maybe falls down the stairs, I don’t know.

I can’t help but feel slightly sorrowful at my current reaction to a song once enshrined in my mind as a ‘golden oldie’. Proof of its enduring reputation is attached: a newer version, recorded a few years later (probably more than I’d like to admit), which manages to be perhaps more charmless in its new sleeker clothes. You sort of think: ‘shouldn’t you know better now?’

At least I tidied up the ending – at some point I must have learned the skill.