heavy

All Along

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

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.

Never A Sound

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

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.