christmas

I Don’t Get No Christmas Cards + COOL MAN

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

I seem to have been going through a small distortion phase for a week or two.

These are two short and insignificant songs, each certainly made within a few hours. What do they mean to me? Not much.

COOL MAN was made with the guitarist from my school band, although strangely I played the main distorted chord sequence on guitar, and he just added those twinkly acoustic pluckings on top which don’t really work. I sing ‘yeah’ multiple times. It’s not really a song. The beginning is quite a lot like Just by Radiohead. I don’t think I really knew that song at the time – I listened to The Bends after most of the other Radiohead albums, and I was still a fledgling fanboy at this point. If you own a guitar, and your knowledge of chords is relatively basic, it’s almost impossible not to play something like COOL MAN or Just, given enough time.

This guitarist friend and I had much more success creating fake radio programmes together than we did with musical tidbits. Staying with a French family in Le Mans on a school trip, we holed ourselves up in the bedroom, too scared to socialise downstairs, and proceeded to record an hour long radio show about Pokémon. This was probably over five years after Pokémon stopped being a ‘thing’. (Not to say I didn’t indulge in it ever again, god no! There’s a time and place, and that time and place is after finals in 3rd year of university aged 23. The original gameboy games, by the way, not the actual card game. I’m not an idiot.)

We also made another infamous little recording called Fucking Paper Hats. The format is radio again, but it’s much shorter, and much, much more offensive. It has nothing to do with fucking, paper, or hats.

Like all good instrumentals, COOL MAN gets increasingly messy as it goes on, and then abruptly ends after the drumming gives up.

 

I Don’t Get No Christmas Cards is my second Christmas song which has very little to do with that special time of year. This one at least does include the word ‘Christmas’ in the lyrics, but that doesn’t really count when it’s a single line repeated over and over again. It strikes me that both my festive songs were written nowhere near December. And then it strikes me again that I constantly have songs like Last Christmas, All I Want For Christmas Is You, and the massive tune Once In Royal David’s City, stuck in my head all year round.

Am I obsessed with Christmas?

I mean, it is the most wonderful time of the year. But no, I don’t think I am. I think I’m just ‘obsessive’ in general. Give me a pen to flick with your fingers and I’ll give you a habit. Give me a song to sing, and I’ll give you a jingle for every second of the day. Give me the month of April, and you’re bound to get another song about Christmas.

From 1.22 I do a guitar solo of sorts, by sliding bar chords quickly around, paying no heed to such imprisoning contrivances like ‘key’, before my voice comes in once more with a fast drum fill. It actually works quite well, weirdly.

At one moment in the song I accidentally say ‘I get’ instead of ‘I don’t get’. There will not be a prize if you can find it, but you will have found it, and that will be enough.

 

One more thing: is it COOL MAN or COOL, MAN? I think because it’s written in capitals, I’ve never thought about it. You’ll have to ask the co-presenter of Fucking Paper Hats.

 

 

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.