memory

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.

It’s Gonna Be Good

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When you save a project on the production software I use, Logic Pro, it makes you give it a name. This can be tricky if you haven’t yet written all of the lyrics. How do you choose a name when you don’t know what the song is about? To this day I have multitudes of unfinished tracks with incredibly unhelpful names like ‘new song’, ‘new new song’, or my favourite: ‘Really Beautiful Amazing Song That Everyone Loves and Is Really Really Good.’ (That one is just a simple 4 bar phrase repeating some chords with a choir-synth sound. I keep finding this out again and again, because it has the unfortunate attributes of being incredibly forgettable, whilst owning a name too seductive to not click on.)

Anyway, It’s Gonna Be Good is called It’s Gonna Be Good not because the lyrics contain a positive, uplifting message, but because I genuinely just thought it was going to be good when I was halfway through making it. SECRETS OF THE ARTIST REVEALED.

And, you know, it is quite good. Good enough for my band to play it until the band stopped, despite no-one in the audience really showing much enthusiasm for it at gigs (they want to DANCE. they want to JUMP.) We carried on playing it because we believed that, to the trained ear, we sounded more polished performing It’s Gonna Be Good than any of the other ones.
NOTE: the attached video contains the original version, dutifully placed first, recorded sometime in 2007. The second half, beginning 3.46, is the version recorded with my band around this time in 2008. It is much better, both because the instrumentation of my friends on keys, bass and guitar is more interesting, and because my singing has improved a bit. In particular: check out the bassist’s little lick at the beginning of the 2nd verse, at 5.22. That’s a bit of proper music! You weren’t expecting that!

This is an important song for me. Like the song that might be at some big but calm revelatory moment in a film. The protagonist lying on his/her back, looking at the sky, squinting, slight smile beginning to form on his/her face. Something has resolved. Something is going to be ok.

I was proud of it, yes. But the reason it feels important for me is different. I think it’s because it’s become lodged in a very specific time and place in my memory. And weirdly, that time/place is 2007, year 10, in Biology class. An interesting thing about lyrics like the ones in Its Gonna Be Good, is that sometimes they’re vague enough that even the writer doesn’t know what they mean. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing: the lyrics convey a certain atmosphere, they’re not trying to say anything concrete. I don’t think I wrote the lyrics in Biology, but at a certain moment, maybe listening to the song months later, the lines in the second verse created an image for me of myself looking out the window of that classroom, distracted and sleepy. The lines are:

‘I want to leave,
The chemistry is killing me,
And how I look outside and dream a lot.
They’re all smiling,
Holding hands,
With their eyes on the ground and their hair in the sky’.

Let’s get one thing out the way: I’ve always known that it was the word ‘chemistry’ that placed me in a classroom in my mind, but I’ve literally just put two and two together and worked out that Chemistry is the wrong subject, I’m definitely picturing my Biology classroom. This all fits in with the dream-vision stereotype: ‘it was like my Chemistry classroom, except it wasn’t my Chemistry classroom, you know?’

So I’m in Biology, I’m looking out the window, and I see couples walking past, down on the street. And they’re all holding hands, and they’re all dressed as punks. They’re all dressed as punks because they all have Mohicans. And as I hear that line ‘their hair in the sky’ I can see their Mohicans stretching up from their bodies, impossibly high. So this isn’t a very imaginative interpretation of those lyrics. In fact it’s boringly literal. But the significant part of it for me is the feeling I get from imagining their faces, and my state of mind. They’re smiling, holding hands, but they’re looking at the ground. Like they’re scared, or shy, or embarrassed. And they just keep walking past this window, and I’m almost nodding off from the summer heat and the sheer boredom of listening to Mr. Branch go on, maybe about Biology, but more probably about his wife.

Over the years, this image has attained mythic proportions in my mind. Like a repeated dream you had when you were younger, or the same fear you used to get every time you turned off the light in the corridor coming back randomly every once in a while. When I listen to It’s Gonna Be Good, I’m 15, and I’m peaceful, and I’m feeling slightly lost.

The final lyrics are:

‘So I burn a line out through the clouds,
And I watch the sleepers taking ground,
And I burn a line into the sky,
Taking it into the night.
Through the trees, make glowing red,
I spread the leaves into my head,
And I’ll wait a while and make a smile,
Softly burning mile by mile’

I don’t know what those ones mean either. But the rhythm of them, and the way I stay on one note for several notes, is much closer to the way I use my voice in more recent music. And they cement the feeling of the song for me. I’m in a classroom, and then I’m out the window, and I’m burning softly out into the sky.

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.