guitar

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.

Russian Step

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I wish that the lyrics in this song were a metaphor. In a pleasant parallel universe in which I led a similar but noticeably cooler and more intelligent life, the lyrics of this song are modified to form a witty and sarcastic character assassination of whoever, using the theme of revolution as an analogy.

Not so in plain old boring reality. I don’t want to be too quick to judge, because I know this is an example of a light-hearted joke outliving its humour – Russian Step was never intended to be a serious comment on the Russian Revolution, nor dictatorships in general. I think I just wanted to write a flippant punky sort of number. The problem is that time adds weight to things. This song was almost always my school band’s encore track, and the bridge hook: ‘Why don’t you take your Russian step and step away again?’ was one of the few lines all of our friends could sing along to. So it occupies quite a large cell in the prison of my memory. And it sits there gathering nostalgic dust until its original form becomes obscured. We’re also far enough away in time from myself in this recording to lose a bit of subtlety in our appreciation of my character. It’s easy to see the song as encapsulating the whole of my personality, rather than just a throwaway expression I meant completely insincerely.

On the other hand… I know that I took music seriously, and I presumably wanted people to think my music was good. So even if the lyrics are a joke, the piece as a whole is meant to be real. It’s meant to be me. And this is a huge issue I’ve always had with these artistic endeavours. Too insincere to just sing about love, or the lack of. Throwing words together cynically because expressing some sort of truth would be cliché, but expecting the music itself to be treated sincerely. It doesn’t work. It’s like a private joke to myself. Incidentally, I heard an infamously bad recording of this school band recently, which I hadn’t listened to in over 5 years. We knew it was terrible at the time, but even so, it hasn’t aged well. And the worst thing about it is not the singing or the playing or the songs. It’s my stage chat. I literally said private jokes into the microphone. And I remember thinking it was cool that the audience wouldn’t get it. Just a nod from one of the band was what I was after. I enjoyed the stilted awkward vibe I gave off. I mean thank god the only people in the audience were 4-6 friends, there not to judge the quality of our band but to relish the teenage freedom of going to a mate’s gig / doggedly showing their support because of the sheer weight of pleading texts in their inbox.

So, Russian Step is about some sort of dictator who, it’s implied, will be overthrown, because everyone is bloody starving. It’s very upbeat, and was much more effective live in sweaty sticky underage venues. The guitar sound is not appropriate at all, it should be crunchier, dirtier. Same with the drums. This was a chronic issue for our band. Listen to the way the bassist and keys player sing that hook – it’s like they’re humming to themselves while trying to remember something else.

The end is the best part of Russian Step, and not just because you’re happy it’s over. Mainly that. But it’s tight. I can still hear the rapturous roar of up to 20 people rise up to me as that final bar ends.

Vive la Revolution!

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.

What A Shame

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

This song slipped through the radar, probably because its more recent version, helpfully entitled ‘What A Shame New’, was created in 2008. The original, however, was written in 2007, and it shows. It shows so much that I can’t understand why I chose to go over it again. And, given that I did go over it again, why did I do so little with it? Actually, come to think of it, did I make it worse?

Yeah, comparing them right now, I think I did.

The newer one is better only in the sense that it has fewer actual mistakes. The singing is marginally better. But the mix is much worse; the earlier one sounds rougher and edgier, like the whole thing is coming out of a shit guitar amp. My voice has an earnest aggression to it which suits the lofi amateurish noise of the recording. The newer one is muddy and bassy, flat, uninspiring, boring.

Both versions have my characteristically nonsensical lyrics from the aged 14-15 era. They’re just terrible, I mean the comical lines:

‘You’re looking at the man in the crowd
Who without a sound
Keeps everyone’s head down.
Maybe it’s his gun’

are kind of stupid but yeah ok maybe it’s a joke song let’s give this guy a chance. But then we get to the bridge:

‘What a shame I could not stay
All alone I’ll be afraid
Why work when you’ve got time?
You should come and see one of mine’

What am I trying to say? As always, just throwing words together at random. It must be the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ fault.

I can’t think of a single biographical thing to say about this song. It summons no memories for me, beyond the fact that I re-recorded some it completely pointlessly. I perhaps remember a vague feeling of hope: ‘yeah… maybe if the drums are played more tightly… and the harmonies are sung better… we could have something…’ And then an inevitable small but numbing disappointment when the song remained the same old dead horse.

It’s amusing because after the last few songs I had begun to think that my past self had turned a corner. I had planned to include in this post the declaration that we had firmly reached the middle era of my music, and that a touch of professionalism would start to creep in from now. Well, the thought is banished.

What a shame.

 

NB: I have run out of space on my Soundcloud (almost 50 songs… and we’ve got nowhere). Songs will now be posted as basic YouTube videos.

NB2: the guitar in What A Shame sounds like the guitar in this:

 

 

All Along

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This is a big one. Potentially the catchiest real song I’ve ever written, All Along is a basic pop number which clocks in at a truly absurd 5 minutes 5 seconds. A big reason for this is the completely unnecessary 8 bars of filler at the end of each chorus. I can imagine I might have made a mistake with the length of the verse when recording the guitar, and then just decided to make all other instruments follow suit, rather than going to the huge effort of rerecording the take.

It’s interesting listening to it now, being absolutely aware that All Along is a pop song. I reckon I was in denial at the time, which might explain why I haven’t adhered to the typical 3.5 minute length limit for this genre. The song uses the 1-5-6-4 chord sequence, for god’s sake, the one made infamous by this video:

It’s pretty much impossible to write a melody which isn’t catchy over those chords, and All Along is no exception, especially because it’s so long you probably know the whole thing off by heart by the time it finishes.

In 2008 I was very much not listening to music that sounds like this, and the song was never really meant to exist in this state. I wrote it on a holiday in the US, and I originally conceived it as a kind of shiny happy sarcastic bitter number, with the music acting as a sickly backdrop to the lyrics, which repeated:

‘And it’s what I’ve been thinking all along,
You can’t survive without me, if I’m gone’

I was halfway through recording a demo when I realised it was going to upset my girlfriend. This genuinely happened. I changed the lyrics so that the second chorus would resolve all issues and create harmony for everyone everywhere:

‘And it’s what I’ve been thinking all along,
I can’t survive without you, if you’re gone’

ENTER LOVE SONG

Then came some bland verses about living and flying, and a bit of picked electric guitar in the 3rd verse that is EXACTLY the same as this: (I honestly don’t think I meant to copy it, I was shocked when I heard the song again later and realised what I’d done.)

But one line remained the same: ‘And I don’t know why I’m feeling so heavy’.

Sounds a bit like happy. But it just isn’t. ‘Heavy’ is not a word you associate with feelings of deep love. Your heart is not ‘heavy’ with love. It’s ‘heavy’ with dread. With regret. Sorrow. The best connotation it can possibly have is probably one to do with reluctance. ‘It is with a heavy heart that I deliver this message.’ ‘It is with a heavy heart that I break up with you.’

The sad truth is that my relationship with this girlfriend was on its way out, and I knew deep down that the fact I had thought I needed to change those lyrics was a sign itself. But the word ‘heavy’ remained – a slightly disconcerting pearl within a happy and over-sized clam.

The song wasn’t fully recorded until a year or two after it was written. Which is maybe why there’s a syncopated guitar riff in the last chorus which is actually a bit good. Also, there’s one moment in the song that I’ve always loved. It’s as I go into the second chorus:

‘We’ll find a way, to meet some daaayyy’

Is it just me or do I sing ‘daaay’ quite nicely? It’s almost like I gathered up the vocal chords and said look guys, we may never sing vibrato again, but just for this second, can you give me a tiny bit of it at the end of this word? Can you hear it? It’s subtle I know.

Anyway, terribly sung the rest of the time, as usual.

I Don’t Get No Christmas Cards + COOL MAN

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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.

 

 

Never A Sound

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This post pays homage to my least significant musical enterprise: a band called Happy Happy Fun Twins.

HHFT was comprised of myself and the bassist from my more ‘serious’ school band. Best friends since the age of 11, we had more than enough time to make some shit music together. And make some shit music together we did.

The first track, Never A Sound, is a bluesy country pastiche, including words such as ‘grain’, ‘land’, ‘wife’, ‘drink’, ‘Lord’, and ‘guitar’. Made on a summer’s afternoon in my bedroom at an age just a little bit too old to find this sort of thing funny, the song has two notable features:

  1. My voice has broken, but not completely. I am quite clearly struggling to reach the bottom notes, and my friend’s voice seems to be lower at many moments, even though we were probably trying to sing the same melody. I imagine we didn’t change the key because I wouldn’t have liked to admit defeat – at that age, a low voice is a prized possession to store in the Fabricated Masculinity Ego Cabinet© along with general strength, footballing skill, ability at Halo (check the year, this may be dated), confidence with girls, and the matter often talked about in hushed worried tones (or blasted out loudly with a false sounding bravado) – the size of your penis.
  2. I strum the chords, and my friend plays an ingenious slide guitar solo, using a glass we had in my room as the slide. This clever tactic has the unwanted side effect of sounding terrible, as you hear the rest of the glass making a scraping sound against the neck of the guitar. But it lends the song a certain air of authenticity, maybe. I don’t know, I’ve never really listened to any country music.

The second song was our first in the Happy Happy Fun Twins outfit, recorded, according to my computer, in 1970. I rechecked my birth certificate just to make sure, and have concluded that I can’t possibly have recorded HEavy Shit then. It’s more likely to have been created some 33 years later. We sat at night (when his mum had already told us to go to bed!!) and recorded this vocal performance by picking out random phrases we found written around his bedroom. I remember us being distinctly impressed with ourselves, sitting there in our pyjamas. It features some of my early attempts at beatboxing. They aren’t good, but unlike most musical skills, my beatboxing has not improved over the years, so I shouldn’t be too condescending.

‘Soak in a pile of soap’ and ‘heavily-laden dishwasher’ are undoubtedly good lines however, as any poet will tell you. I won’t even scrape the surface of their potential interpretations here, but my god, tomes could be written.

There were two HHFT songs that didn’t make the cut here. One was some variations on the Happy Birthday song, made for my first girlfriend. She was pleased. The other was an improvised story telling/singing attempt called Revenger of the Peace, which sounds a lot like we were high at the time. We weren’t. We just had the giggles. Spend enough time with one person in a house and you begin to find anything funny. They have been omitted mainly because I can’t be bothered to write about them.

Another two will come later, as the years wind on.

 

For All My Time

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I’ll begin with a tangent:

At university I read ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion‘, a poem by Yeats, and it had such a big effect on me that most of my lyrics since then have been influenced in some way by it. There’s a good reason for that – Yeats’ poem is one of the best examples of a piece of writing about not knowing what to write:

‘I sought a theme and sought for it in vain… What can I but enumerate old themes’?

To an aspiring young writer, whose thoughts never seem to quite manage the creation of a world famous poem, it’s comforting to read about other people’s dissatisfaction with their own mind. ‘Oh’, I’d think. ‘Yeats also fails to come up with anything occasionally. We have something in common.’ ‘But, oh’, I’d think again. ‘He seems to have turned his own dead-end thinking into yet another brilliant poem. I never seem to do that. Perhaps I should go to the shop and buy a chocolate, maybe stop in at a friend’s room on the way back to eat the chocolate, with a cup of tea, we could chat about our days so far, yes I think I should probably have a break, I’ll return a fresh person with fresh ideas.’

But the poem is about more than just not knowing what to write, obviously. The way Yeats looked back at his life and saw his whole work as just flashes of memory, images and symbols made me think a lot about the way we live life in general. Our experience is recorded in our minds as memories. And the word ‘memory’ tells us how much we lose to the past. The fact that we have a word for things we remember, and everything else that we lived through is just an indistinct blur. Which is not to say that those moments we can’t remember don’t have an effect on the way we grow or who we are or what we like, but when we are old and have finished our life’s work, whatever that might be, we will look back and see a tiny number of memories against the vast number of moments we lived through and forgot. The sum of our experience will seem to be smaller than it was.

So maybe the best thing to do in life is to create memories as often as possible. Even bad memories can become good with enough time. A terrible day when you lost your phone, got drenched in the rain, broke up with your partner, tripped when walking up some stairs, ordered some food and it arrived cold, told a joke and no-one laughed, and ended up in hospital with appendicitis – that day may with enough time be one of your best stories, may be one of the distinct memory blocks that make up your life.

 

Anyway, back to this eminently forgettable piece of music.

For All My Time was written two years before I got to university, and four years before I read that Yeats poem. But its lyrics are similar to the sort of things I would write much later. Well, some of them are. The song suffers from the inconsistency and lack of editing that we’re all used to by now in these early songs, and so what starts quite promisingly as a wistful song about ‘wasted hours’ and things that ‘disappear with time’ begins to be invaded by murmurings of a boring break-up song:

‘Just turn the other cheek,
You’ll be gone in a week’

and the very strange:

‘Hey, I think it’s very rude
For you to ask for more than shelter and food’

For All My Time is also ridiculously long for a country-ish blues-ish song of a reasonable tempo. If it was simply halved, it might have been one of my best songs from its year of composition (2008). It might also have needed some better vocal takes, although even mentioning my terrible singing seems pointless this far in.

 

At 3.57, I attempt a linear drumming fill, with poor to moderate success. Linear drumming is when you don’t hit any drums at the same time. This is, I’m certain, the only moment of linear drumming in my entire output. So soak it in. I’d had a few drum lessons on it in the weeks leading up the recording. Clearly not as many as I needed.

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

If It Means The World To You

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Picture the scene:

We’re in early 2008. ‘Now You’re Gone’ by Basshunter is no.1 in the charts, and I certainly can’t remember how that goes. People are still trying to work out what the 00s are about. I’m not sure anyone will ever know. The financial crisis is rolling.

And a 16-year-old, who cares little of the above, decides to expose a voice that shouldn’t be exposed to such an exposing degree. With consequences which, although not as severe as those caused by the financial crisis, are undesirable.

Sometimes I listen back to old songs and I wonder why I didn’t just change the key of the song a little bit to make it more within my singing range. I don’t wonder for long though because I know the answer, really. For too long, the most important thing for me was just finishing the song. I cared so much about the whole I forgot about the parts. And, with respect to the popular saying, a whole made of shit parts tends to just be a bigger shit.

Lucky then, that not every part of If It Means The World To You is bad. The strings, for example, are simple but lift the song appropriately. The lyrics, also simple, are effective. This is 10% a love song, and 90% a song about not knowing what to say when you’re meant to be comforting someone. A problem I have often encountered, especially as a teenager, due to my difficulty with seeming genuine when reacting to anything.

‘I will try my best to be as warm as you,
But if my coat’s not big enough, what will I do?’

Are a couple of good lines which convey the idea of getting everything wrong in these conversations.

And the tune as well, though sung badly, is pleasant enough.

There is a room in my parent’s house in which I spent a lot of my time growing up, because it has a television. And a big red sofa that has sunk in on itself in a comfortingly familiar way, over time. In this room is a collection of percussion instruments from around the world that my parents collected through the years. They sit in the corner of the room, near to the television, so I’ve spent a lot of time looking indirectly at them. The shaker used in the original version of this song is one of those instruments, so when I hear the song, I think of that room, and I feel the warmth you get from the most predictable, familiar settings.

 

If It Means The World To You slipped under the radar for a while. I think I decided, like any sane person would, that I had ruined it with my singing and I didn’t wish to pursue it any further. Until one day in my first year at university when I heard it again, and decided I liked the strings, and liked the basic emotion it had. So I recorded a new rough demo version on a small mic I had in my room.

It is much better than the original. I cleverly realised I had to lower the song’s pitch a bit in order to sing it. I sped it up a bit. I took out the percussion (this was probably out of necessity – I didn’t keep a large collection of world percussion instruments in my room at university), and I stopped singing ‘can’t’ in an american accent.

Someone I was in a band with at the time told me a couple of months later that he had started listening to it when he was going to sleep. Which was a bit over the top if you ask me. But this guy was one of those effortlessly cool people you instantly like and admire. So I took the compliment, and continued attempting to be more like him.

Here’s a better use of strings: