Song For Tuesday

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

While compiling this list, I have been forced to think a lot about my past. Not in a very serious way it’s true, but as I’ve listened to each song I’ve imagined myself during that time – what I was feeling, what I wanted in music and outside of it. This is the first song in the list that didn’t make me imagine a very small version of myself. I listened to this song and realised that in terms of the Trying Artist, my childhood was almost over.

That’s an inaccurate reaction of course – this song was probably written a few weeks either side of the songs next to it. But there’s something different about it. Maybe it’s the slightly increased degree of professionalism in the recording (this will undoubtedly not be consistent). Maybe it’s the lyrics, looking forward in a wistful way, that made me look backwards in the same tone. Maybe it’s that it took me longer to stop regarding this song as ‘good’, than it did with other ones. I continued listening to it a lot until I was a few years older, and so I associate it with being reasonably grown up.

Either way, I heard Song For Tuesday and immediately thought: ‘this is the start of the middle-era of my music’. To others that might sound insignificant, but for me, having these recorded moments of skill(?) and emotion, with their own memories attached, it means a lot. I break up my life into songs. I think: I was that age, I was with that girlfriend, I was recording that music. I have a terrible longterm memory, but I find I have nothing more evocative than my own music, and the music I was listening to at the time.

I think my first relationship ended shortly before the writing of this song. It was a serious relationship – at least we were adamant that it should be seen as such, and would shoot angry glances at any passers-by who we thought were being patronising (basically anyone who looked at us). It lasted over 2 years, but 13-15 is not the most serious of ages. The lyrics had nothing to do with how it ended, but I think my romantic situation (or lack of) may have contributed to the song’s yearning feel. I remember having one sustained thought for a few years afterwards: ‘She never got to hear any of my good songs.’ She of course was appropriately encouraging and admiring when she needed to be with all of the songs I showed her, but she never got to hear what they became. I guess I associated the progress of my music with my own life.

 

Song For Tuesday has nothing to do with Tuesday. I suppose I might have written it on that day of the week, but knowing me, I almost certainly wrote it on a Sunday and thought it would be funny to just pick the wrong day. Still laughing after all these years…

I think the song was a satirical tribute to the way my mind works – i.e. I find it very hard to make my mind up. The biggest clue I have is that it was saved in an album I had made on iTunes called ‘Make Up Your Fucking Miiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnd’. That, and the climax of the song: ‘I’m gonna make up my mind’. I’m pretty sure I was clever enough at the time to deliberately repeat the phrase in the first verse ‘I’m gonna fly’ to provoke increasing doubt. That or I just needed enough words to complete the verse.

As usual though, we get a few lyrics that simply don’t make sense. The first two lines mean absolutely nothing in the context of the song. I probably couldn’t decide what I wanted it to be about.

Wistful:

You’re Not Alone

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

A band song, the chords written by the guitarist and bassist, the melody and words written by me. But that’s not important right now. What is important are the lines in the second verse:

‘Now I know that you say you’re right
But let me tell you,
I’ve seen fakers lie better
Than you could tell the truth.

I know what it’s like to be alone
And I’m not going back.’

Everything about those lyrics grates on me, right down to the ‘but let me tell you’. The most immediately annoying thing is obviously the naivety/authenticity issue. Some 15 year old moaning about how he has plumbed the depths of loneliness and despair doesn’t suggest the emotional impact of Juliette waking up to find Romeo dead beside her. Let’s also not forget that the singer sings these lines to someone he is clearly in a serious relationship with now. So the loneliness could be assumed to have happened 2/3 years earlier. The memory he is alluding to might well have been when he lost his mum in the supermarket for ten minutes and was trapped in a dark forest of striding strangers’ legs.

But maybe you’re a postmodern reader and you subscribe to the Death of the Author. Maybe you don’t think the age of the writer makes any difference – it’s the words themselves that matter. Well, I mean first up, there isn’t really anything poetic about those lines is there? But no matter, lyrics don’t have to be abstract or complex, or even rhyme. Take Lorraine Ellison’s chorus:

‘Stay with me baby
Please stay with me baby
Oh, stay with me baby
I can’t go on’

These lyrics make up one of the most powerful choruses of all time, because the music and the vocal performance lifts them. This is the difference between lyrics and poetry – music has the ability to transform phrases we might class as cliché into powerful, profound statements. But I’m not fully, or even at all, convinced that the musical performance of my lyrics in ‘You’re Not Alone’ has done anything except make them just slightly worse.

Then there’s a predictable consistency issue, as with pretty much every song I’ve written about so far. On first listen, it’s easy to be fooled into thinking that ‘You’re Not Alone’ contains a series of well-matched verses that all relate to a central, consolatory message.

In fact, listen again (if you can manage it), and you’ll find that there are three distinct shades to the ‘You’re Not Alone’ message, none of which makes sense together.

  1. (a) Your basic, ‘you’re not alone, I’m here with you’ message. This narrative arc features the song’s best line: ‘Turn the light on inside, you can’t see in the dark’, and it’s basically what you think the song is about if you aren’t concentrating, mainly because of its title.

(b) But even within this first narrative, there is a second strain which succinctly discredits part 1 with a couple of choice phrases:

‘I know that you aren’t used
To this kind of advice
From someone on the street’

Actually coming in the first verse, those lines tell us that the singer is a stranger to the addressee of the song, which is completely at odds with the tone of the rest of the lyrics, in particular with narrative 2:

2. These are the lyrics quoted at the top of this post. They essentially read ‘You are lying. Please don’t leave me.’ Suddenly the situation is reversed in two ways: the characters do know each other very well, and it’s actually the singer who might be alone.

3. Finally, we have a resigned message about consolatory messages in general.

‘Well you’re not what you wanted to be,
But let’s just leave that all behind.
When there’s nothing left to shout for,
People tell you: ‘At least you’ve got your health’

So, it’s a song about a person consoling someone else or being consoled or being dumped or not liking being consoled or consoling in the first place.

We in the band liked this song a lot, once upon a time. We never played it live much because we thought it was too slow/ we couldn’t play it very well. But we’d show it to people. ‘Listen to this, what do you think? It’s a song we wrote about taxis and leading a healthy lifestyle’

RABBITS IN THE RAIN

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

My sister’s friend heard me playing guitar once and asked me to write her a song. I said ok give me a minute, and walked off. She laughed, I laughed, we all laughed. 2 days later I came back to her with RABBITS IN THE RAIN. Title in capitals, presumably to add a bit of gravitas to a theme I was worried people might treat with too much levity.

A tragedy in bunny’s clothing, this is a song about the voracious and perverse appetite of consumerism, the desperate struggle of the oppressed against systemic oppressive forces, and rabbits dancing around having a lovely time when it’s a bit wet.

That last part of the theme is covered succinctly but repeatedly in the choruses. I obviously deemed ‘rabbits in the rain’ description enough to translate the complex, multi-layered visions I’m sure I was having at the time. And I was right. Rabbits are so heavily connotative in our society that merely mentioning them over a couple of happy chords is enough to suggest a cute scene, maybe springtime, bucolic splendour, nature running its course, a world untouched by evil. The rain is a slight spanner though. Are they happy in the rain? Is it Bambi Little April Showers, or is it a darkening foreboding storm?

Regardless, we all know what happens in Bambi.

Boom, enter the minor chord, and the verse begins. It starts off harmlessly enough:

‘The rabbit has got his lettuce
And no one will take it from him
You don’t want to fight a rabbit
When it’s got its lettuce’

But in here are the corrosive seeds of greed, the same greed that will lead to Billy the Rabbit stealing from Old Farmer Jack. The same greed that will cause Billy’s death.

What can a rabbit do? His land encroached on by the constantly increasing consumption of humanity, a modern day rabbit is forced to steal in order to survive. Do you think Billy was raised to be a thief? No, Sofia the Rabbit was a rabbit of principle and dignity. But she too had to steal, eventually. And Billy sees no moral dilemma in taking back from those who ruined his last 4 homes, killed half of his friends, and left many more starving. Old Farmer Jack deserves what he’s got coming to him, Billy believes.

Trouble:

‘Old Farmer Jack
Has come out with his gun.
Run, Rabbits, run,
You don’t want Farmer Jack to get you’

And here we get the unstoppable force of the system crashing against those who would attempt to disrupt it. What is a warren of rabbits to a single human with a gun? Lettuce crumbs dropping from their panicked hungry mouths, they scatter. What started off as an act of conscious collective rebellion, a small victory in a world of grinding losses, becomes a free-for-all of selfish chaos, as rabbits clamber over each other to save their own skin. This is how the system wins. It breaks spirits. It reduces oppressed beings to their most basic and dangerous drive: to survive. In this state, even a generous, compassionate, and cute rabbit like Billy begins to display the same pernicious qualities found in the oppressors he so loathes.

Today, Billy doesn’t even get the chance to save himself. Perhaps served on a plate, with a side of the lettuce he had wanted. Maybe just discarded with the disdain Farmer Jack reserves for beings he decides are worth less than himself.

‘The rabbits were so afraid
Nowhere to go
And Billy was taken down
He was too slow’

 

 

 

Five Years On

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

At first, I was pleasantly surprised by these lyrics. I thought they were maybe trying to say something. Then I inspected closer and realised that they should belong to three completely different songs.

Song 1: Teenage boy complains about how everyone just wants to be cool these days. Vague descriptions of house parties. The despondency when the high (probably induced by too many fizzy drinks) ends.

Song 2: Nondescript song about a doomed relationship. ‘Don’t ever wait for me’. I’m no good for you. I’m a lost cause. Classic gender normative fare really, cf. pop music.

Song 3: Vague motivational message song, coming in at 2.34, akin to 90s dance music that tells you to live your life, be yourself, stay real, reach the top.

Song 1 has the most potential, and could almost be quite good if the guitar riff wasn’t performed so terribly. And the singing too. The bit where that other guitar comes in at ‘Your lights are all out’ is nice. It brings an image to my mind, somehow. Lying on someone’s floor I don’t know very well, at the end of a party. Feeling that strange mixture of tension and freedom you get when around lots of people who don’t know you. You want to impress, but can do so in ways you wouldn’t feel able to when surrounded by the people who know you well enough to trap you in your own personality. At one point I was sat on a staircase, with others around me at various levels, when a very fat guy, maybe 5 years older than us, came out of his bedroom. He was the host’s older brother, and it turned out he had been there the whole time, in hiding. He moved first to the living room, where he discovered his Xbox and tv had both been stolen. Then he came to us, and started complaining. He wasn’t very confident, and the constant loud noise that had been the party seemed to have subdued him sufficiently that he couldn’t bring himself to shout at us, or blame us for what had happened. After a while he sat down at the top of the stairs, and told us he had a party trick. We judgmental 15 year olds nodded enthusiastically, sensing the opportunity to take the piss, to assert our feebly flickering egos. Cue sarcastic ‘Oh yeah?’s from all around. ‘Yes’, he said. ‘I can do an impression of Thom Yorke singing Mary Had A Little Lamb’.

That was enough to get everyone laughing before he’d even had the chance to embarrass himself. But there was something about that time of the night, everyone tired-drunk and faded, the party refuse littered across the floor, that made his claim seem kind of appropriate, maybe even significant. We all went quiet. ‘Go on then’.

What followed was honestly the most incredible 20 second vocal performance of my life. Everything about it was right. His voice was unmistakably Thom Yorke, with just enough comedy exaggeration to make it fun, but the best thing about it was the way he changed the tune of ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’ to make it sound exactly like a Radiohead song. It was beautiful, and we were spellbound. This was pre-smartphone era, so no-one filmed it. But I’ll aways remember watching this fat, shy boy, still suffering from stolen-Xbox bereavement, win the eternal support of ten drunk teenagers with the strangest, most ethereal 3am impersonation of my favourite singer.

This event almost definitely didn’t inspire Five Years On. But it’s the image that the lyrics in the verse bring me. I’m sorry that the song doesn’t match up to the story.

It was the first proper song I wrote based on a riff, rather than a chord sequence, and it proved to be a riff that I couldn’t stop playing when I picked up my guitar. So much so, that it will appear again in another song five years on.

Re: song 3’s theme, try this:

 

Ok, it isn’t 90s, but it is motivational in vague ways.

I especially like ‘Anything you’ve been thinking of’. It’s like ‘if there’s anything uplifting we’ve missed, just insert it here’.

Take It Apart (and Take Me With You)

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

Before some diehard fan I didn’t know existed calls me out on this, I’ll admit it myself: this is not the original version of Take It Apart. That version is lost in a real-life parallel universe: the world of old hard drives. Strewn inside the drawers and cupboards of people who treasure memory enough to backup all their music, photos, ideas, and pirated films in the first place is an entire Earth of lost information, never to be recovered. When I started this project I found school essays from the age of 14, poems written to exes, a play my friends and I had attempted to write when drunk, and so so many Photo Booth pictures with that effect on that makes you look like a pop art print. But having scoured my house for a few days testing every old box that looked vaguely electronic, I was unable to find Take It Apart 1. In fact, I wouldn’t have known this wasn’t the original version unless it was helpfully labelled ‘Take It Apart NEW’ on my old iTunes.

Before we continue, I’m going to use this opportunity to preserve the memory of one more song that could never be found: Take Me With You. My memory would put this as maybe my 6th song ever, so I really wanted to find it. But it had disappeared. I bring it up because it has one good memory attached to it. In science classes pre-6th form I sat next to a friend who would not allow me to talk about my music without interrupting me by singing the last chorus of Take Me With You. He especially enjoyed singing the ‘oooh’ at the end of: ‘Take me with youuuuu, oooooohh’. He has continued doing this ever since – it has been 9 years. In fact, I had completely forgotten the song even existed until one day he told me ‘I’ve always preferred your early works’ and sung it again. RIP Take Me With You.

There are a few clues that Take It Apart is actually a newer version of the original: The drumming has been redone, and is a bit more in time than I would expect from a song of this era. The piano entry may or may not have been in the original, I suspect it wasn’t. The strings seem a bit lush compared to what you’ve heard before. There’s an effect on the vocals in the bridge. The singing I’m sure was redone, although it’s still pretty poor. There’s some programmed percussion.

But the main part of the song is the same. It’s got some catchy bits. The big harmonies at the end almost work and remind me vaguely of The Lighthouse Family. The lyrics are typically non-sensical:

‘Just take it apart, just take it back home.
Bring what you want, just bring it back home’

sounds like classic Oasis to me:

‘We’re singing things that sound big, but you’re not sure why,
and the sun shiiiiiiiinnneees’.

In fact, listening to this song now I had the sudden realisation that the ‘It dies if you don’t water it’ line was literally inspired by a plant with a smiley face attached to it that a friend of mine bought me at the time.
Needless to say, it died.

 

Apart From Me

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

The words ‘I’ and ‘me’ appear 21 times in this song. There are only 104 words in total, and 11 of those are ‘oh’. I am currently writing about myself singing a song written by me, which constantly references myself. I guess it’s not so unusual, people continually focus on themselves when talking about most things, and I probably wouldn’t have noticed it if it weren’t for those lines in the 2nd verse:

‘Oh, I tried to see what I could learn easily,
And what else there could be, apart from me.’

Well, I didn’t try hard enough. The song presents itself as incredibly self-obsessed, although I know that the lyrics had no meaning in terms of my real life, beyond the fact that I am a top-class worrier. Mainly, I was clearly just struggling with the ‘ee’ rhymes. The temptation when you can’t think of a theme is to think in and of the 1st person. If that doesn’t work, you talk about having nothing to say (look to the bottom of this post for a song that does this, very effectively). Sometimes trying to come up with anything is like looking into a hall of mirrors. You see your own blank face reflected endlessly around you in various states of distortion. I was definitely trapped there when writing this song.

On the subject of self-reflection, listening to this song I had a sudden vision of myself leaving school in summer, walking to the first road crossing where the lollypop lady would be waiting, as she had done every day for thousands of years, taking out my headphones, a specific kind of on-ear job that wrapped around the back of your head, rather than the top, thereby making you look like a loser (‘yeah, but, I’m not a loser, so I don’t care’ I suppose I would tell myself) and selecting one of my own songs to listen to. This song, probably. I know that I liked listening to this one a lot. I also know, because I still do, that I liked listening to my own music in general a lot. Depending on my mood, this activity would provoke different emotions. On this particular occasion, with the sun beating down on my stuffy black uniform, and my rucksack forming strap-shaped sweat patches on my shoulders that were uncomfortable but also kind of comforting, you know? I would probably have been feeling overwhelmingly positive. School is over, it’s sunny, I can produce songs all on my own, I’ve got a new guitar (did you hear that the guitar suddenly sounds nicer in this recording?), I’m good at music. At other times, I would look out the rain-streaked window of the bus, dark outside, and think about the homework I had to do when I got home, and hear every single mistake immortalised in the song, not least the fact that I cannot hit those top notes in the chorus at all, and I would denounce all my work so far in one fell swoop. It’s all shit.

Most of the time though, the feeling would be somewhat colder – a sort of steely determination that one day, I’ll be better, and people will know. They’ll know who I am because I will be too good to not know. Standard egotistical fantasy fare really, except that I would obsess over these old songs to an unreasonable degree. I knew it was unreasonable, because if anyone glanced at my iPod, I would subtly but rapidly tilt the screen away from them so they wouldn’t know I had been listening to myself, even if the stranger on the bus couldn’t be realistically expected to link the name with my face. I would feel ashamed that I kept putting on my own music, but it was a strong compulsion. I know every mistake in every song I’ve made by heart. I know it’s coming when I’m 30 seconds away from it, and I clench my teeth in anticipation. And I know every bit that makes me glow secretly with pride. And I listen to those bits more.

I still do all of this. But now my listening is more useful. A mistake I hear in an old recording will not reappear in a new song. Ok, fine, maybe it will. But I’ll go back and fix the mistake when I hear it. Sometimes.

Good Morning I’m Not Mad

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

On a road near my house there lived an old man who was a bit mad. The only noticeable symptom of his madness was that he’d cheerfully say good morning to you as you passed by. Maybe it’s sad that we live in a society where that could be a sign of madness… Maybe it was justifiably odd that he’d say it at 11pm.

So I wrote a song about him. And then I put ‘Good Morning’ as the tagline on my Nike iDs, but that’s a different story. Well, actually it’s quite relevant: I must have liked this song a lot. So let’s start with the good points:

  1. The chorus could be anthemic. As evidence, try singing Coldplay’s ‘God Put A Smile Upon Your Face’ over the top. It works. The chords are basically the same. I didn’t copy this one deliberately. I remember saying proudly to a friend when we realised they were similar: ‘my one has one more chord in the progression though’.
  2. The lyrics are not bad, and more importantly, in terms of my early standards, they have a consistent theme.
  3. It used to go down well at my band’s gigs. There’s a terrible video of us playing it in a bar when only one friend had come (the person filming), and every other audience member was sitting at tables trying to have a quiet one. My voice sounds mangled and shaky (it often was when we played live, on account of me moving my arms quite quickly at the drums). I realise that story doesn’t suggest it went down well, but I think it did, generally.
  4. The second version is the first recorded song which includes the fourth member of the band – the keyboardist. One day during band practice my doorbell rang, and I answered to find this friend (he lived very close) shifting nervously between feet. DRAMATIC REENACTMENT — ‘Oh, hi.’ ‘Oh, hi’. ‘I’ve got band practice on at the moment.’ ‘Yeah um, so I was just wondering if I could be in the band as well..’ ‘Oh, right. Um, yeah, on keys?’ ‘Yeah’. ‘Oh. Umm, I guess yeah, I’ll have to ask the others but that would be fine yeah I guess.’ ‘Yeah, alright.’ — DRAMATIC REENACTMENT OVER.

Re: point 4 – this friend would prove to be my most enduring musical companion, out of the 3 in the band. Our alliance started a bit inauspiciously- he was a singer, a good songwriter, competent at jazz piano, confident on the violin, rhythm was not his strong point. I wanted him to basically stab out a few chords in a couple of below average indie-pop songs (in time).

The first version of Good Morning I’m Not Mad was recorded on my own though, maybe a year before the band version. It is worse. There are a couple of terrible rhythmic mistakes (I especially like the one in the 2nd chorus where I hit the crash cymbal immediately afterwards as a blatant attempt at covering up the mistake). The singing is, I would say, more out of tune than in the 2nd version, although it’s a close contest. The jazzy bit at the end is cooler in version 2, mainly because of the nice bass and piano not played by me. Oh and also the first version has a completely wrong chord strummed once near the beginning of the outro. Couldn’t I have spent 2 minutes fixing it? Yes. I could have.

However, there is a vibe that I like to the original. It’s more exposed and wiry. It has a bit of grunge to it. The band song sounds like you’re hearing it through a thick cloud. The instruments blend into each other. There’s no definition. I never spent much time mixing tracks in those days, the instruments came out pretty much as recorded. And I never spent much time recording them either…

Until next time, good morning.

 

 

Sit Back And Relax

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

Ergh, it’s just so dreary. The tune, I mean. ‘All the things you saiiiiiiiddddd’. The rest of the song is very upbeat and enthusiastic. We played it in the band, and it was maybe my first experience of exterior pressures dictating music choices, in that we kept playing it for ages. Teenager audiences love that bounce. Teenager audiences love that pause and then the sarcastic ‘honey’. At least we thought they did. Listening to it now it’s just so drab, I think. Drab and dreary.

I hate the sound of the guitar, it’s too shiny clean. But not like a brand new car, more like a clean tin. Imagine you’ve washed out the baked beans, and you’re just gazing into that tin.

The bridge, perhaps the best part, is stolen from an earlier song. I’m not judging, I mean if you think this one is bad try that one. Thank god the section was rescued from the wreckage. But it’s a bit like being rescued from your ruined house, and then being blamed for it having burned down, and then being left in the street, and you don’t like the street anymore, it being the blackened site of your ex-house.

It makes me feel weird, remembering myself turn my head to the left, sat at the drum kit in some pub, to drawl out the word ‘honey’. I think I used to think I was cool when I did that. I probably was, I guess. People in bands are cool. People in audiences don’t always judge as harshly as your future patronising self. Sometimes I would get compliments, having stepped down from the stage.

I just don’t like this song. I also think I can remember my bandmates not really liking it either. Like they knew my songwriting wasn’t really up to scratch, like they were plotting secretly. Do I remember some dispirited bass playing coming from the corner during rehearsals? I might do. The guitarist probably liked it. He liked playing bouncy guitar. He would bounce a bit on stage, with an extremely affable wide smile across his face at all times.

Anyway, I chose that picture because behind the lazy-teenager veneer of these lyrics is this strange paranoia, and the ominous spectre of capitalism:

“What’s wrong with my life?
I keep on counting all the days ahead”

This could be the lament of an office drone, tired of his daily grind. You might expect some lyrics about breaking free and focusing on real happiness, not ambition. But no! Actually he turns out to be a reluctant layabout, who gets nothing but snide judgment from his listener:

“What’s wrong with your life?
Well, you don’t have any money.
Maybe that’s because you made the decision
Not to work, honey.”

Such a prick! Why was I on the wrong side??

We’re On Your Side

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

I had many of these as my standards changed from year to year, but this was definitely, at one point, ‘my first good song’. It was also my first song to properly use electric guitar, to properly use distortion, to properly try to ‘rock’, as it were.

And let’s be completely frank, it doesn’t sound great, does it? You wouldn’t hear it on the radio and turn to your friend and go, ‘ey, Sophie, this is pretty good isn’t it? We should look up who this band is and then buy their music in order to download it legally and then perhaps catch them at a summer festival, shouldn’t we? I might even fancy a t shirt.’

The singing is awful in places, and things go out of time, as is their wont. The guitar solo at the end attempts to use very few notes to disguise the fact that I can’t quite play the guitar, and ends up audibly confirming the fact that I can’t quite play the guitar. What else? Oh, AGAIN we have a song starting with almost nonsensical lyrics, a product of my technique of improvising words as I strummed the chord sequence the first few times.

But

Get to the second half of the first verse, and you might start liking the song just a little bit. Of all the recorded moments of my teenager-with-attitude mode of singing, the lines:

“Look at my picture, I drew it for you in my spare time,
It’s yours if you want it, but it’s fine”

Just work, I think. They sound knowing and sarcastic even as they admit immaturity. Maybe I’m giving them too much credit, I mean they essentially have nothing, tone-wise, to do with many of the other lines, which seem to be offering much more genuine attempts at comfort to the listener in question. But they click for me.

Then we have the chorus, which is catchy. Sometimes I like to look down on music for being merely ‘catchy’, a lot of us do, don’t we? It’s catchy, so it sold out. It’s catchy, so they can’t sing, so they didn’t actually write it you know, oh verse chorus verse chorus bridge chorus how dull.

Well, in this case, I had nowhere to sell out, having not sold at all, and yes I can’t sing but give me a break will you, and I did actually write it, not that I’m necessarily hugely proud of that. And yeah ok that structure does perfectly describe this song, but give me just one break please, will you?

The thing is, I’m not sure any piece of music I had written up until this point was catchy at all really. Oh, actually. But apart from that, and we should probably discount that one, I recognised after having produced this that it was a bit catchy. And I liked that. When you hear the bridge build, you do actually want to hear the chorus again. It sets you up nicely. Sure, the ensuing chorus is then ruined by the guitar solo, but in this life, we can’t have everything we want.

Also:

“Out of the screen and into the light”

What about that line these days. What with the youth? And the telephones?

The Christmas Song

~ tryingartist ~ 1 Comment

The Christmas Song. Neither about, nor written around the time of, Christmas. A song designed to make young teenager friends jump up and down at underage venues, featuring lyrics suggesting mild disdain without saying much of anything, serious indie rock drumming, and the vigorous strumming of three chords.

The cornerstone of my first band’s repertoire up until the point we had songs that were any good, The Christmas Song sticks out in my memory like a sore nostalgic thumb. It is, and always was, terrible, but it had a bouncy energy that guaranteed it its coveted last place in the setlist for a year or so, and when I listen to it I can’t help but remember a few friends half-ironically going MadForIt, or my sister turning up to our empty gig venue with a huge brigade of 13 year olds and saving the day, or our girlfriends turning up to our first gig, at school Battle of the Bands, holding a banner with our name above them, and generally making so much noise that the judges had to give us 1st place.

These memories give the song a meaning that it rightfully shouldn’t have, being so shit. But what can you do?

The guitar solo is an extremely rare feature in any of my music, and exists here only because it isn’t me on guitar (my guitar skills were not really ‘solo’ grade – I provided the three bar chords and then got on with hitting the drums quite hard).

The guitarist was one of those musicians who loves to learn. He would practise sequences of blues licks to be incorporated into solos. He would focus on technique a lot. Are you getting my disparaging tone? I remember when we were working on the solo, he was going through his list of little flourishes that he’d learnt in his lessons and I just couldn’t understand why he was approaching improvising in that way. I felt too awkward to tell him he wasn’t channeling the spirit of blues. But then again, musicians like that often end up actually becoming good at things. My laissez-faire attitude was fun but would sometimes lead to three-chord compositions featuring first lines that I know for a fact had no meaning whatsoever.

The second version on the playlist (‘The Christmas Song 1’) is actually the original, and I include it only to demonstrate how much worse it could have been.

And below is a song by now-extinct The Fratellis, a key component of indie rock for two years. They used a very similar chord progression (did I steal it? I honestly can’t remember) before wisely switching to something more melodic for most of the song. I actually liked that album a lot.