bass

It’s Gonna Be Good

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When you save a project on the production software I use, Logic Pro, it makes you give it a name. This can be tricky if you haven’t yet written all of the lyrics. How do you choose a name when you don’t know what the song is about? To this day I have multitudes of unfinished tracks with incredibly unhelpful names like ‘new song’, ‘new new song’, or my favourite: ‘Really Beautiful Amazing Song That Everyone Loves and Is Really Really Good.’ (That one is just a simple 4 bar phrase repeating some chords with a choir-synth sound. I keep finding this out again and again, because it has the unfortunate attributes of being incredibly forgettable, whilst owning a name too seductive to not click on.)

Anyway, It’s Gonna Be Good is called It’s Gonna Be Good not because the lyrics contain a positive, uplifting message, but because I genuinely just thought it was going to be good when I was halfway through making it. SECRETS OF THE ARTIST REVEALED.

And, you know, it is quite good. Good enough for my band to play it until the band stopped, despite no-one in the audience really showing much enthusiasm for it at gigs (they want to DANCE. they want to JUMP.) We carried on playing it because we believed that, to the trained ear, we sounded more polished performing It’s Gonna Be Good than any of the other ones.
NOTE: the attached video contains the original version, dutifully placed first, recorded sometime in 2007. The second half, beginning 3.46, is the version recorded with my band around this time in 2008. It is much better, both because the instrumentation of my friends on keys, bass and guitar is more interesting, and because my singing has improved a bit. In particular: check out the bassist’s little lick at the beginning of the 2nd verse, at 5.22. That’s a bit of proper music! You weren’t expecting that!

This is an important song for me. Like the song that might be at some big but calm revelatory moment in a film. The protagonist lying on his/her back, looking at the sky, squinting, slight smile beginning to form on his/her face. Something has resolved. Something is going to be ok.

I was proud of it, yes. But the reason it feels important for me is different. I think it’s because it’s become lodged in a very specific time and place in my memory. And weirdly, that time/place is 2007, year 10, in Biology class. An interesting thing about lyrics like the ones in Its Gonna Be Good, is that sometimes they’re vague enough that even the writer doesn’t know what they mean. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing: the lyrics convey a certain atmosphere, they’re not trying to say anything concrete. I don’t think I wrote the lyrics in Biology, but at a certain moment, maybe listening to the song months later, the lines in the second verse created an image for me of myself looking out the window of that classroom, distracted and sleepy. The lines are:

‘I want to leave,
The chemistry is killing me,
And how I look outside and dream a lot.
They’re all smiling,
Holding hands,
With their eyes on the ground and their hair in the sky’.

Let’s get one thing out the way: I’ve always known that it was the word ‘chemistry’ that placed me in a classroom in my mind, but I’ve literally just put two and two together and worked out that Chemistry is the wrong subject, I’m definitely picturing my Biology classroom. This all fits in with the dream-vision stereotype: ‘it was like my Chemistry classroom, except it wasn’t my Chemistry classroom, you know?’

So I’m in Biology, I’m looking out the window, and I see couples walking past, down on the street. And they’re all holding hands, and they’re all dressed as punks. They’re all dressed as punks because they all have Mohicans. And as I hear that line ‘their hair in the sky’ I can see their Mohicans stretching up from their bodies, impossibly high. So this isn’t a very imaginative interpretation of those lyrics. In fact it’s boringly literal. But the significant part of it for me is the feeling I get from imagining their faces, and my state of mind. They’re smiling, holding hands, but they’re looking at the ground. Like they’re scared, or shy, or embarrassed. And they just keep walking past this window, and I’m almost nodding off from the summer heat and the sheer boredom of listening to Mr. Branch go on, maybe about Biology, but more probably about his wife.

Over the years, this image has attained mythic proportions in my mind. Like a repeated dream you had when you were younger, or the same fear you used to get every time you turned off the light in the corridor coming back randomly every once in a while. When I listen to It’s Gonna Be Good, I’m 15, and I’m peaceful, and I’m feeling slightly lost.

The final lyrics are:

‘So I burn a line out through the clouds,
And I watch the sleepers taking ground,
And I burn a line into the sky,
Taking it into the night.
Through the trees, make glowing red,
I spread the leaves into my head,
And I’ll wait a while and make a smile,
Softly burning mile by mile’

I don’t know what those ones mean either. But the rhythm of them, and the way I stay on one note for several notes, is much closer to the way I use my voice in more recent music. And they cement the feeling of the song for me. I’m in a classroom, and then I’m out the window, and I’m burning softly out into the sky.

In The Corner

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The chronological order of these songs is for some reason becoming increasingly hard at the moment. Once again, I began writing with eager fingers, ready to type the words ‘Middle Era’ in a welcoming fashion, perhaps with fancy formatting like this:

Welcome to The Middle Era.

Instead I’ve spent the last hour desperately trying to muddle my way through this blended 2008-2009 world, relying on my infamously unreliable memory, my dodgy, untrustworthy document ambitiously titled ‘Discography’, and certain musical clues in songs like: How shit is it? And, to what extent does the singer sound like an annoying 15 year old?

My heart and my head both tell me that In The Corner was probably written before most of the last 6 or so songs I posted. But the rest of my body is sitting comfortably, knowing I’ll never have the dedication nor research skill to definitively prove this is the case.

So, In The Corner will sit here awkwardly, camouflaged in its 2nd verse strings and extra percussion, which were almost definitely added months later, thereby causing Mass Chronological Confusion.

Anyway, the song itself:

In The Corner was a big one. One of my most successful pop songs, I thought at the time. It is catchy, no doubt…

When I listen to it, I think of the disgusting blue t-shirt I was wearing as my band played Battle of the Bands. It was our first gig, we brought loads of friends, we won, and I’m pretty sure we played In The Corner as our last song. It’s an extremely happy memory – one of the times where being in a band really does feel like the most fun thing in the world. A memory which is only slightly tainted by how much I dislike the song now.

But I do dislike it. There’s something so annoyingly naive about it. The lyrics all about being friends, the sickly sweet melody, sung sickeningly badly by myself. The acoustic guitar, the bouncy bass line, with the top string clearly out of tune. The drum groove stolen from Easy by Lionel Richie (ok I actually quite like that bit). The Lighthouse Family style strings. The ‘oh oh oh oh oh oh’ bits in the chorus. I imagine my friends in the band thinking fuckin ‘ell not this one again. Being embarrassed at me croaking it out each time. I assume really they were none the wiser. But the whole thing does seem a bit lame. We played this song for a long time in the band. GUYS. WAKE UP. BE A BIT MORE OFFENSIVE FOR CHRIST’S SAKE.

As a side note, I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet that my first collection of my own songs on iTunes was called ‘Invasion’. Haha. Then it later graduated and became ‘Quick, Invasion!’ which is awfully emo. We’re still in the ‘Quick, Invasion!’ phase here. But just think of that phrase and then In The Corner playing in the background. It’s hilariously inappropriate. I spent so long unsure of what I wanted my music to actually sound like. And it’s a million miles away from In The Corner.

Smiling Cos He Made It

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I think I liked this song for ages because it was just after I’d learnt how to play major-7 chords on guitar, one of which begins the track, and I’d decided that was all pretty advanced and special.

Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t developed a problem with major-7 chords, some of my best chords are major-7s, but I have developed a problem with the song.

The verses are fine, especially the second one with its percussion on the ride and hi-hat. Lyrically I quite like it, although I distinctly remember thinking it was more profound than it sounds now. When you’re 16 the subject of social group dynamics and trying to get with girls is pretty intellectually stimulating. Actually I won’t sit here typing on my high horse – I still find those subjects very worthwhile topics of conversation. But the lyrics do come across a bit juvenile now.

Am I constantly underestimating my younger self? I think I might be. Not musically, no. These songs really are quite bad. But I think I was ‘aware’, mentally. I like to think my 16 year old self was adopting a sort of ironically self-referential yet wearily and dismissively distant yet resigned and trapped yet wise and knowing approach to these themes. It’s just so difficult to tell now. The impact of the sound on my ears doesn’t make me think: ‘this guy’s got it going on. He knows what’s what and he isn’t afraid to tell us’.

The title. I still come across this issue almost daily. The word is ‘because’, we’re all aware of that. But the lyrics are definitely ’cause’, which of course is an accepted abbreviated form. But it never looks right to me. I always read it as ’cause’ like ’cause and effect’. My whole life I have used ‘cos’ cos it reads more like a colloquial abbreviated form. Which, again, is ok, many people do that. In texts, in emails, on facebook. But it doesn’t look right in a title. There is the conundrum. I have preserved it nonetheless, for the sake of historical accuracy.
(It strikes me that this whole paragraph is the sort unlikely to make it past the 1st draft of a piece of writing. It’s definitely staying.)

Anyway, that chorus is meant to be a ‘big’ chorus, but it’s too messy for that. Every instrument goes in and out of time in amounts small enough to not sound like obvious mistakes, but large enough to prevent you from enjoying the song. The repeated line ‘he’s smiling cos he made it’ is too simple for the scene the rest of the song sets up. I want some sarcasm, or anguish, or tension, or any sort of emotion besides bland smugness. And then we get that awful bit at the end where I put some ‘character’ into the line by shortening the words to ‘he’s sm-li- c- he made it’, or whatever, and then it gets more bouncy, and I don’t normally take the Lord’s name in vain, but god it just doesn’t work, especially when I try to elaborate a bit on the melody and just sing some random higher notes in a strained uncertain sort of way.

The bridge is a random blues. It’s noteworthy because the blues does feature in a lot of my songs, but it does sound a bit like a fragment of a different song has been squashed in to eat up some seconds. Maybe it was. Anyway, all in all it’s a track that gets worse as it goes on.

Second on the playlist is a remix I did a bit less than a year later. ELECTRONIC MUSIC IS COMING, is the message, and what an important message that is, looking back on everything. Electronic sounds would begin to seep in from that moment onwards, although very gradually at first.

Musically, the remix has the advantage of being a year later, benefitting from slightly more knowledge on my part. It has the disadvantage of being an act of flogging a dead horse. 4/10.

 

 

RABBITS IN THE RAIN

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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’

 

 

 

Sit Back And Relax

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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

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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.

 

 

Like Knots On A Rope

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In the summer of 2007 I went to Greece, and just before I got in the car, I ran upstairs, found all of my dad’s CDs, and picked one for the journey to the airport. That CD was Kid A, and it was the first time I had properly listened to Radiohead. The initial descending keyboard riff came in, that soft kick drum beating beneath the pulsing chords, Everything In Its Right Place driving ominously onwards, and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I hated the rest of the album, but when my dad stopped the car, I told him I needed to take the CD with me to show my friend that first track.

Several hours later, I was in his apartment, shrugging off his attempt to give me a tour of the place, and putting the CD on. His reaction was the same. Over the course of that week, I stopped hating the rest of the album. I started liking it. One month later, I was still listening to it everyday. My friend, meanwhile, had discovered OK Computer and told me to try that one. I dismissed it in that way you do when someone shows you something you wanted to discover yourself. But I did secretly listen to it on my own, judging it to be inferior initially, then slowly absorbing all of it – taking in its tone first, and then the resigned passion of its lyrics.

In a matter of weeks, Radiohead were my favourite band. I went through every album, always disappointed at first that each one didn’t replicate the sound of the one I had listened to previously, then growing to love them all.

Eventually, I wrote this song. My first Radiohead impression. I remember sitting at my window, looking out at a view blank enough to stimulate any kind of thought process, and attempting to channel the mood of Radiohead. It was my first song written as lyrics before the chords existed, chords which were half improvised a few days later on an out of tune guitar, thereby essentially ruining the song.

The lyrics and accompanying melody do quite well at capturing the mood of Radiohead actually, if not the meaning:

“Today I’ll try and reach it,
Quick wash it away,
I’ll try and make it.

From a friend, like knots on a rope
Fix the problem

I can’t want the picture,
The side of views.

Today I’ll try and reach it,
Quick wash it away,
I’ll try and make it.

From a friend, like knots on a rope
Fix the problem.”

An analysis of those words would just as likely suggest masturbation as a theme than anything else. But they seem to carry a bit of gravity in the song, which is more than I can say about almost any other lyrics I wrote in the year surrounding Like Knots On A Rope.

In 2007 I was so, so far from being able to emulate Radiohead in any way. But as the years have passed I would have to name them as my foremost influence, in the way their worldview is reflected in music, and especially in their transition to electronic music.

This will in no way be reflected by any other song on The Trying Artist for a long time. Goodbye Radiohead pastiches! Hello again badly executed bland indie rock/pop!

 

 

When The Music Plays Too Loud

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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!

Bullets And Guns

~ tryingartist ~ 1 Comment

A very early band song that I suspect came earlier than this list suggests, and was probably overlooked initially because god it is quite boring. Bullets And Guns is, however, notable for a few things:

  1.  The lyrics are one of the shiniest shining examples of the let’s-just-throw-words-together-in-a-row tradition of songwriting in my catalogue of music. I’m going to have to write them out in full to illustrate this:

“Wait until I’m done, don’t you know it’s fun?
Not today, it’s a yes by the way
I came undone with the bullets and guns
But now I can’t see what’s left of me

Don’t feel you have to agree
You will not fly down easily
When it’s hard you talk to me
Don’t keep on pedalling down

Experiments for the ones who have the laws
You want it, not today, but do you have your way?
Can they see? it seems unlikely
That they have dreams with black and white themes.

CHORUS

And when you feel like you’re standing on the edge
Don’t fall down
And when you feel like you’re standing on the edge
Don’t keep on pedalling down”

Now clearly there is a theme here. The choruses and the bridge seem to be offering pearls of wisdom (if you feel depressed, don’t) to someone else. But the verses are just completely inexplicable. The first verse reads like schizophrenia and the second is some sort of anti-system riff. I really can’t comprehend why I didn’t hesitate before writing lyrics like this, unless it was simply that I knew the vocals were the weakest part of the songs and so I didn’t put as much effort into their creation.

 

2. The bridge is by far the best bit of the song. I liked it so much at the time that I stole it and recycled it in a later band song, which also turned out to be quite bad.

 

3. I actually have a specific memory about the recording of this song. A clash of egos occurred between me and one of my bandmates. He complained that he didn’t get to sing enough. Now this was tricky because he was, without doubt, technically a better singer than me. But when I thought about other people singing MY SONGS I got really angry and defensive (especially because I knew I would be seriously under threat, given how shit I was), so I sulkily said ‘ok we’ll do two versions then, one with me singing and one with you, and then we’ll decide which one is better’. Of course, this put a huge amount of pressure on him – pressure which he was not able to overcome. His version is second on the playlist, and given the mistakes he makes with the lyrics, I probably only gave him one attempt. It all feels very Machiavellian. There’s no doubt that my version was better, probably because I had practised it more, had written it myself, and stood there glaring at him while he recorded his own. He ended up making do with a few harmonies. But the truth is that despite his superior technique, I probably was a better fit for our music, and after this little skirmish I was able to hold onto my seat of power for a few more years, even after the band expanded to include yet another person who could probably sing more skilfully than me.

The key to my getting my own way, as demonstrated by this blog, was in the sheer number of songs that I was producing. Knowledge of music theory, ability to play instruments or sing, all these things were secondary when every week or two I had another song to bring to the table. And so we trundled on, kind of without problems.