https://soundcloud.com/thetryingartist/small-animals

For my next song, an atmospheric instrumental that spirals slowly out of time. The spiralling not deliberate, of course.

For a bit, as the piano chord builds up, I actually like it. But then as it goes on, you ask, why hasn’t he changed it? Is it going to just keep going like this? Has he realised that he’s slowly going out of time?

Well: I don’t know, yes, and I guess not. Not until right at the end, where the ‘I’m fed up’ drum fill signals the end.

This was my first use of piano in a song, which I played by hammering various white keys with my two first fingers, moving them quickly from note to note as if I was playing the drums. It is a percussion instrument after all. I taught myself to play piano and guitar, which is why my technique has always been so bad (although technique has never been my strong point, even in drums and bass guitar where I had a good few years of lessons). I have always been more interested in writing a new song than actually practising certain aspects of my playing.

This song is significant because, I know now, piano would very gradually overtake guitar as my main instrument when writing songs. Small Animals, though, was essentially just a Garageband song- a few instrument parts building up and repeating, except this time I played them myself, quite badly.

Here’s something better with arpeggios

https://soundcloud.com/thetryingartist/sets/dark-dude

Featuring a bass line I still play when absent-minded, a bass solo that is simple yet tuneful, and lyrics so catchy they have never left my consciousness, Dude can only be considered a classic in the very-early-post-post-punk-pre-sophistication-joke-songs-by-me tradition.

‘Yeah, yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.
yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah,
I’ve got a sausage in my pocket,
and it’s very very hard.
This is not referring to an erect penis,
But I really like them,
I really really do.
I… like… them… yeah….
yeah… yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah’

[BASS SOLO]

Many academics have suggested that this is the first song I ever wrote, citing as evidence the complete lack of acoustic guitar, an instrument that admittedly did come after bass guitar and drums for me.

They also propose hazy memories I may or may not have of playing the song live to friends in summer living rooms, long before I’d ever recorded anything.

And yet I resist the idea. My gut tells me it was indeed an extremely early song. But my head implores me to find any song, any sincere attempt at music at all that could predate Dude. If not, the foundation of all my efforts, the rock on which my future career rests, would be a dick joke.

And so, the history books will continue to list Hyper, Ever Come Near Me, and I Don’t Know as all coming first.

Dark, a slightly later instrumental version of the same song, clearly designed to render it more ‘classy’, is of absolutely no interest.

https://soundcloud.com/thetryingartist/i-dont-know

When I made this song, I thought it was significantly better than the first two. It is, sort of. It definitely starts much better. In fact, I suspect there might be a couple of lost songs in between. Maybe I did it over a weekend instead of one evening, and bothered to fix some of the mistakes. Which is not to say there aren’t mistakes, god no. One of which being the fact that the sound is peaking the entire way through the song. Sorry about that. 

I like meta things. But sometimes I worry that artists go for meta when they have nothing else to say. When you’re sat there, ‘pen in hand’ (to this day I think I’ve written a grand total of five songs worth of lyrics by pen), and you can’t think of any words, your first thought is that you can’t think of anything. Which is why, when I’m writing a new song, and I’m improvising lyrics over a chord sequence to work out a melody, I often automatically sing the words ‘I don’t know’. In this instance, the words made it to the title.

Before I’m too disparaging of this song however, it has to be said that ‘Why do you think I’m not cool, have you seen my ipod?’ is one of my sassiest early lines. ipod as trendy consumer symbol- ipod as modern representative of the sum of a person’s music taste- music taste as signifier of cool. Sung with a nice knowing sarcasm- the emphasis on the ‘t’ of not and the ‘d’ of ipod.

Unfortunately that line is surrounded by quite a few renditions of ‘don’t ask me why I don’t go with the flow’, which is as bland as you like, and if it was also meant to be tinged with knowing sarcasm, I no longer hear it.

I remember receiving a comment from a girl I didn’t know on my Myspace music page at the time, which said something like: ‘Nice song, cool effect on your voice!’ This made me feel attractive, which I liked a lot. But it also made me doubt myself- was she aware that the effect was there partly to conceal the mediocrity of my voice? And more importantly, did she actually fancy me or not?

https://soundcloud.com/thetryingartist/hyper

So here it is, my first song, written and performed by me. What do you think?

I don’t remember the moment I showed this to mum and dad, but I imagine that my 14 year old self sat there, legs twitching (legs always twitching unless specified otherwise), seriously proud. And to my parents’ credit, I’m pretty sure their reactions were appropriately proud as well. If they hadn’t been- if the wool had been pulled out from under my eyes and I had really understood that the song wasn’t particularrlllly good, I might not have written the close to 200 songs which followed it. So thanks to my parents for listening with rose-tinted ears.

The distorted octave bass playing along to a metronome which introduces the song was not an auspicious start to my music career. Although the (perhaps frivolous) layering up of parts has been a component of much of my music ever since.

I’ve always felt strongly that electric feeling of adrenaline when creating anything quickly. And it explains in part why so many of these early songs have such obvious mistakes in them. The timing errors going out of the chorus for example. I just couldn’t wait to show everyone what I had made. Couldn’t wait until I’d unblocked my nose, or stopped messing up the drum fills, or maybe learned a few more chords before writing a song.

Connected to this is a KEY feature of my early music- the mouse click as I finish recording. All these early songs were recorded on an Apple computer, using only the internal microphone. Very little post-performance editing of the audio tracks occurred, and the deleting of untoward extra-musical sounds I found to be an unnecessary indulgence. So, we have many mouse clicks.

Harmonically, the chords change at one point from e minor to e major, which is actually slightly advanced, if it had been done with any sort of awareness. I think at this time I used to just play one chord, then another chord, and attempt to fashion melodies around the change, no matter what it sounded like.

 And finally, the lyrics. The inspiration for this song I remember was the scene on Kingsland Road as I got off the bus in winter at night, the scary boys who hung out on the corner (who never once threatened me at all). ‘Walking through the streets at night’- a fair line, although maybe one you shouldn’t repeat for so much of the song, without having Lou Reed’s voice. However: ‘sitting watching running starting starting looking starting running getting nowhere ’til we’ is alright, and similar to the style of lyrics from much later songs, much better songs. 

The thematic content here, and many others from the early period, is quite clearly influenced by the melodrama of Muse. Blame them. And the lyrics get a lot worse than this song, for example in my next work^

https://soundcloud.com/thetryingartist/sets/garageband

This is how it all started. Rearranging pre-made Garageband loops. For those who don’t know, Garageband is a basic music programme on Macs, which offers thousands of recorded riffs or chord sequences, all in the same key, for you to have fun arranging and editing. Once I started playing my own instruments, I continued to record using Garageband for a good few years. But the only thing I actually played in all four of these songs is the piano solo at the beginning of the first track. Which, you know…

It brightens up your day though, no doubt.

Perhaps the greatest creative input I had in these pieces was the choosing of the name. ‘Converted from the Israelites’ is interesting. I have absolutely no idea where that came from. Converted to what? The song itself is elusive… dreamy… offering no concrete answers.

I’ve included these because Garageband, even when I was solely using its loops, taught me the basics of editing audio files, using effects, mixing, and structure/texture in music.

There are (or were before I lost most of them) a huge number of Garageband songs. I picked three of the best ones, and one of the funniest ones.