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Shoot Them Down

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

At the heart of Shoot Them Down is a pretty good song. It has a verse, and then it has a bridge, and then it has a chorus, like all good Adele songs. It has many parts actually, most of which work well. It’s catchy without being too cheesy. In particular, the arrangement is effective. This is the first thing to improve in my music. Given my incompetent jack of all trades approach, I gradually learned how to place simple parts together to make a whole that sounded ok, whilst the individual instruments continued to be performed to a sort of primary school ‘good effort’ level. You may notice some artificial brass sounds. I liked them a lot. They made me feel like a ‘composer’. The 3rd verse stabs have always been my favourite bit. 

It’s early 2009, I’m 17, and, to a certain extent, we’re out of the woods. Songs will now generally offer at least one thing to make the 4 minutes worth your while – a small fresh leaf of basil on a plain dish of under or over-cooked pasta. If the lyrics don’t make sense, there will usually be a reason for that: ‘I was under the influence of dadaism that day’, or ‘I couldn’t be bothered’. Some mistakes will have been corrected before the song was packaged and posted. Others won’t have been, sure. And gradually, imperceptibly, my singing voice is going to improve, from the unthinkable lows of Hyper, to the relative highs of Knowing How To Use Your Voice In A Track.

So, I measure my life out in girlfriends. This is strange, I know, but a combination of developing a reputation for being a Relationship Person (always vehemently denied, I would counter that I just happened to be with people I actually liked), and historical quirks, meant that it just seemed right to create mental memory slots labelled by relationship. Historical quirk-wise, it so happened that all my early relationships were between 1 and 2 years long, at an age where quite a lot happens in that amount of time. The first lasted from the age of 13 to 15, the early teenage anxious/defiant phase. Then there was a neat 15-16 one, covering GCSEs, and the advent of drunkenness. And then another lasted the whole of 6th form, ages 16-19 – the growing-up-a-little-bit era. This categorisation sounds extremely unemotional. It doesn’t feel like that for me. Anyway, Shoot Them Down is the first song from that last phase – The 3rd Girlfriend. It isn’t really about her (‘I used to know a girl’ is the first clue – we were in the early days of our relationship), but there are references. The beginning of our romance included a lot of me waiting with an undignified level of keenness for her to text, and then trekking across London to see her at 2am. She would normally be with her friends, people I knew a bit, but not enough to protect me from the intensely hostile atmosphere they created. (This was all a front of course, what wasn’t in those days? They were pretty much all fun and nice people, and only a little bit criminal). I’m sure I didn’t help with my passively judgmental face and incessant sarcasm. So maybe one day I was feeling annoyed, perhaps she hadn’t texted, or maybe I’d just had a shit time pretending to be 20-30% cooler than I was for hours the night before. And so I wrote this song, imagining her to be a pretender just like me. Just a sly reference, nothing more. But I was clearly suffering from bitterness that day. Useful for writing songs, it seems.

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.