bass

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.

Don’t Compromise

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

A completely seminal work. The first love song I wrote, for the first girlfriend I had. I remember us sitting on her bed and me playing her the song in person through headphones, unironically proud of the song, eager to hear her bowledoverwithemotion response. A response which I’m actually pretty sure I got. From that moment on I knew that in writing songs for other people I could make them far happier than with any other gift, and I could legitimately show off at the same time. A goldmine of non-selfless good deeds.

Maybe I would still write lyrics like this if I didn’t get the creeping feeling that I can no longer sing the word ‘love’ without it coming across as insincere, like ‘I cliché you’, or I ‘what everyone else says’ you (just typing the word right now I accidentally wrote ‘kive’ instead, as if my fingers were embarrassed). Unless I’m talking about the lack of feeling, or love as an abstract concept, in which case it’s somehow ok.

Which gives me a thought about love songs in general. There’s something about the recorded, permanent element of a love song that causes it to colour differently over time, as relationships are broken and succeeded by new ones. Even if I did still love the person this song was written about, would I feel it in the same way? Would the youngness of my voice remind me of a different feeling I used to have which is no longer part of me? When I hear this song, it suggests to me more than anything else that the memories I have of this relationship were experienced by two different people to whom we are today, in contrast to the lyrics, which are all about permanence – feelings remaining exactly the same. Even as a listener, does the sound of my voice influence the impact of the lyrics? I imagine it might seem like a song about naivety, rather than true love.

I’ll just mention that at the time, she and I completely seriously discussed marriage. This song was meant to come across as extremely genuine.

Which makes the opening lines: ‘It’s not what it looks like’ very amusing. Sure, they are eventually resolved with the follow-up: ‘I’m just in love’, but still – What does it look like? Later on in the second verse we get: ‘I can’t seem to get things right’, and right at the end: ‘I don’t want to go’. I appear to be wracked with guilt. Maybe in the back of my mind there were already the glimmers of contempt-for-unproblematic-love-song lightbulbs.

No such glimmers for the bass solo though, which is a prominent and quite funny feature of the song. Nor for the classic messy ending chord change that may end up being a motif for more than half of my music.

NB – Big respect for the drumming in this song, which in marked contrast to pretty much every song that comes before it, is restrained and relatively in time.

 

 

 

Roger’s Day Out

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

https://soundcloud.com/thetryingartist/rogers-day-out

A song shrouded in mysteries, the greatest of which is: ‘Why did he bother writing, and then actually recording this song?’

The title informs us that this is to be a joke song, yet even attempts at humour are few and far between, and those that exist are half-hearted and ineffective:

‘Walk down the street about 350 metres where Roger
attempts to buy an ice-cream from a very rude foreigner.
‘That will be £1.20 sir’
Roger walks out
‘Excuse me sir, but you haven’t paid’
‘Well I don’t care’

The joke- that Roger is the rude one, not the ice-cream seller, is rehashed (unconsciously) from VeRY RuDE, and is less funny in this drab new setting.

More significant in this song than the jokes are the messy, flashy drum fills, and the instrumental beginning section of the chorus suggests to me that the song was mainly a vehicle for me to try and show off a bit on the ol’ drum kit.

However even those fills are not so  prominent. The question remains – what is the point of this song?

It begins with silence and then the sound of me moving from the computer to the drum kit, followed by metronome clicks – the level of apathy that caused me to not bother removing this 15 second intro tells you exactly how I felt about the work having finished it.

And yet…  Listening to it now there seems to be a patchwork of ideas that reflect many different aspects of my music in general. There’s the irreverent (/irrelevant) joke song, the Arrogant Rebel Figure, the emphasis on instrumental texture rather than melody, and finally, weirdly, there are brief glimmers of a sort of post-Radiohead dystopian bleak landscape/feeling that becomes increasingly apparent in my lyrics up until today.

The only memory I have of the process of writing this song is a vision evoked by the line: ‘he walks down the stairs of his life-block’: a 1984-esque grey featureless apartment block, and a street outside full of uncaring people.

This seems ridiculous now, it’s almost as if I entertained for 3 seconds the possibility of writing some poetry and then thought ‘nah fuck it, he can just buy some ice cream and call someone a foreigner.’

But then right at the end again: ‘Roger wants everything. He gets it. But he’s not…’ (enter sad minor chord implying ‘not happy’)

These aren’t good lyrics, but they’re getting closer to things that I would consider writing about now.

Here is a song with a vague lyrical feeling that has been very influential on the way I write, and which might very well reflect the inside of Roger’s head:

But You Ain’t Right

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

https://soundcloud.com/thetryingartist/but-you-aint-right

‘You think that you can treat me half as bad to what you think,
But you ain’t right, when it’s ok you can stay all day,
And it’s too bad when the sky is dark, and the sun is sad,
And it’s not right.

And in the end we all fall down,
And it doesn’t matter who you are.

Everyone everywhere has a place of mind and a place of touch,
Where they can feel when it’s ok, and when they can pay,
And when the time is right and only on this day,
It’s worth the wait, but it’s not right.

And in the end we all fall down,
And it doesn’t matter who you are.

And the image flickers through the street, ask anyone you meet,
About the old man, who used to sit and pray,
Look at his feet and wait for the next day,
Then they took him away.

And in the end we all fall down,
And it doesn’t matter who you are.

The image flickers through the street,
Ask anyone you meet.
Used to sit and pray,
Before they took him away.’

 

As you may have already gathered, the lyrics to this song make no sense. The first sentence especially just isn’t a sentence. After that, individual lines begin working a bit, at least grammatically, but there simply isn’t a theme.

A brief synopsis of each paragraph:

  1. You think you can treat me bad but you can’t, and it’s shit when the weather is grim.
  2. Everyone dies.
  3. Everyone can find somewhere to think(?) and to pay for sex(?!!!).
  4. Everyone dies.
  5. An old man, maybe homeless, used to pray on the street, but then The System got rid of him.
  6. Just to reiterate: everyone dies.
  7. Just to reiterate: The System.

It must have been one of those where I improvise the lyrics as I write the song and then don’t do much editing afterwards, there’s no other explanation for this. My guess is that it started off as a bland dysfunctional relationship song, then I sung the chorus and decided at that point to change it to a bland description of life and death issues.

I begin an absurd number of lines with ‘and’, which is sort of revealing, it’s like: ‘this thought, AND then this thought, AND what about this thought’.

The combined sound of the guitar strumming and the ride cymbal is nice in the chorus though, eh?

Oh and there’s a surprise jazz ending. Only appropriate that a song with such inconsistent words should switch style for no reason. Look out for one more of these later.

 

Here’s another tune with a similar message:

Nothing In Particular

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

https://soundcloud.com/thetryingartist/nothing-in-particular

I like to give little awards to things in my head. This particular prize is a tough contest with some very strong competitors, but I think ‘Nothing In Particular’ just about wins it: ‘Worst Ending To Any Song I’ve Made’.

There are many Trying Artist songs which feature the messy final mouse click, or the ok-I-give-up collapse of rhythm in all the instruments, but it’s the specific way in which my voice strains out the final four lines – four lines of improbably bad quality – before the instruments stutter and fade, that wins this song the prestigious award.

‘Go ahead and call for backup,
I’m sure they will come running,
Or instead why don’t you shut up
And back away into the corner’

Come on! Come on! I can’t believe I’m hearing these lyrics years later. I imagine different embodiments of me, playing the instruments separately, all cringing with shame when the singer version of me cracks those words out, unable to carry on playing, looking around at each other in disbelief.

Except that clearly didn’t happen. Clearly they were encouraging him.

It’s important to note here that this song, and its lyrical content, does fit within a certain thematic genre of my music as a whole: The Slightly Ironic Arrogant Rebel Figure. There will be a few more of these as the years drag on. The lyrics in these songs stand out because they are so unlike my personality, which is more like a Very Ironic Timidly Arrogant Obedient Citizen. I was a little bit more combative in the old days – I thought I was cool and didn’t like it when other people thought they were cool. However, this never caused me to start fights with people because they talked about their last holiday a bit too much.

 

I remember my Dad showing this song to someone, it might have been my drum teacher. His comment was ‘the guitars are out of tune’. Concise, to the point, succinct, correct.

 

 

 

THE SONG THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

~ tryingartist ~ 1 Comment

https://soundcloud.com/thetryingartist/the-song-that-changed-the-world

Basically, if I’ve put the title in capitals, it’s going to be bad.

Although, to be fair to myself, I think the large letters denote a lack of seriousness in my attitude towards the song, rather than an absurd level of confidence about the song’s impact. And also, come to think of it, is this song worse than all its contemporaries? Absolutely not.

But, ‘THE SONG THAT CHANGED THE WORLD’ is still a bit bad, and if it has changed the world, it is in ways so subtle as to be completely imperceptible, even by its creator, who looks avidly for these things all the time.

It is in fact an extremely significant song for me, being the first song I recorded with two friends who remained in my band until the end of school.

Which is why the guitar and bass playing see a slight improvement, whilst the obnoxiously loud drumming fills are good old fashioned Trying Artist.

This band, with the later addition of a keys player, was a source of happiness for us all, and we went on to achieve great* things**.

*a few
**gigs

I’m struck by how much ‘TSTCTW’ strives and fails to be like this much later piece:

VErY RuDE

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

https://soundcloud.com/thetryingartist/very-rude

This is a rap song. There will be three of these, all of a certain calibre.

Needless to say, VErY RuDE, as implied by its jaunty use of capital letters, is not a serious song, and as with Bond films, is best judged on its own terms.

Seen as a golden classic by the 3-4 people who have had the wisdom to follow my musical career, it does have some merit. The beat, featuring my only use of slapped bass, could have been good if I hadn’t made it so sloppily. My bass playing was actually near its best around this time, when I still had lessons, and before I got into playing guitar a lot more. Can you tell?

Also, some of the lines are funny. A few of them. Well maybe not funny, but poetic, even.

‘It’s a bit early, so I just want some meat’ is very intriguing. I’m not sure the average person prefers meat, and only meat, at an earlier hour. Maybe I’m wrong. But the key to many of these lines is improvisation. I assume that they were basically made up on the spot, with revisions in the more refined middle section.

The poetic voice then confounds us all with the revelation that he actually ordered ‘chicken burger and fries’. So not just meat then. And all because he’s ‘in a good mood’. So maybe the early hour provokes a desire for meat, and his contentment does the same for fried potato.

There are wild accusations of ‘this place’s lies’, completely unfounded, and then we come to the crux of the protagonist’s pain: ‘and he didn’t give me ketchup with my food’.

This leads to a cataclysmic reaction from our antihero, who fucks shit up and then gets on his figurative high horse and figuratively gallops off. But not before uttering my favourite line:

‘McDonald’s is going down,
McDonald’s has got to pay,
And I’m not gonna fucking stay,
And brush it away with a frown‘

A ridiculously quaint last phrase there, although perhaps appropriate from a character who later refers to his victims’ phones as ‘telecoms’.

***SPOILER ALERT***  The saga ends with the protagonist declaring: ‘I have plans’, before gradually realising that the bullet that hit him earlier has actually left him deceased. A lame ending, although you do get to hear the brushing frown line again.

JME is a much better rapper, but he also likes to throw in the odd quaint phrase, as in this classic:

‘Put the TV on mute, have a drink but I don’t blaze’
‘You need to type of this CV, Microsoft Word, that’s you, you’re a nerd’
‘I’m left-handed, my mum calls me lefty’

CLEAN TOILETS

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

https://soundcloud.com/thetryingartist/clean-toilets

Listening again to this song, my first interpretation was of the protagonist undergoing some sort of hellish muddled hallucinations. A whirlwind of pristine porcelain. A glistening white prison.

The question I was asking myself was: Why is cleanliness causing such anguish here?

And then it struck me.

The voice is not that of a prisoner, but a prison guard. This is the anguish of the obsessive compulsive totalitarian. A man so consumed by his need for order and hygiene that his world is a crashing mess of pain and dissonance.

And, whether it be the completely distorted opening, the chromatic melodies and out of tune harmonies or the stuttering, tight drumming, there is dissonance everywhere.

I don’t know whether it was deliberate or not, but the prolonged groans of ‘clean’ towards the end of the song can really only be described as ‘constipated’. It is also impossible to know now whether or not I genuinely believed ‘infestates’ was a word.

My personal memories of this song are vague. I know that I very much liked the bass line and used to play it a lot. I know that at the time I was relatively proud of the song. I thought it had intrigue. I remember telling a friend that those sliding harmonies on the ‘yeah yeah yeah’s were cool. I don’t remember whether or not he agreed.

I’m fairly certain that this song did not reflect some sort of digestive or hygienic anxiety I had.