music

What You Want (2)

~ tryingartist ~ 1 Comment

This is the second version of a song written in the same US trip as All Along. The first version exists, but is too similar to bother posting as well. So you’ll be delighted to know you’re listening to something with slightly better drum programming than I was actually capable of in Summer ’08.

Are you a ‘Death of the Author’ style critic? Are you all about close reading and intrinsic criticism? Or is it all about new-historicism? Is context inescapable and all-important, and do words mean nothing on a page in a vacuum?

The former type of person would say this about What You Want: its lyrics clearly form part of the most significant trope of all electronic music: sex. It’s man + woman promising each other sexual paradise, with driving, euphoric, hypnotic music accompanying and heightening the impact of this promise.

The latter would say this: yuck, is that his sister he’s singing to?

Yes it is. Being the most gifted and available female vocalist on my family holiday in America, I did indeed get my sister to sing the main ‘What you want’ hook in this song. It was my first foray into this sort of music, and I thought I should probably stick by the rulebook, lyrically. I then added in the reply, ‘I’ll give it’, to complete a harmonious and potentially incestuous picture.

Now, obviously, to me this wasn’t problematic. We were just playing dress up in song form, singing lyrics so bland they carry no real message. But there has always been a slight tension in showing people the song who might be able to spot who the two vocalists are. ‘Yes it is my sister.’ ‘No I don’t think it’s weird.’ ‘Yes I know it’s a good song, thank you.’

Anyway, biographical context aside, there is something fun about What You Want. It builds steadily until it becomes genuinely quite euphoric. The electronic production means there are no dodgy instrument moments. The repeated vocal samples mean there are no dodgy singing moments. I enjoy the predictability of it. You know that after every 8 or 16 bars, something else is going to come in.

It’s always made me think of a relaxed daytime beach bar, or a journey sometime in the late afternoon. Which is why I’ve attached a blurry picture of a boat sailing into the sunset. It’s a stock-image type of song, I think.

It never really felt that significant to me, at the time. I think it’s because I had no desire to make music like this when I was 16, nor did I listen to much music like it. But as I got older it grew on me. Vague memories a few years later of a friend walking round in circles to this song, a song with similar but better emotional rises:

whilst in another room a different intoxicated friend and I listened to What You Want on headphones and he told me how great he thought it was.

And then, only a few months ago, someone told me they had been in Newcastle at a friend’s flat when a song had come on the speakers. She was convinced she had heard it before so she asked him what it was. He said she definitely wouldn’t know. But she went over to check, and it was What You Want. He had downloaded it whilst it was still up on my original Soundcloud, which is astonishing given that it had less than 200 plays in total, and almost all of them must have been from friends and family.

So, it’s a song that is mildly good. And now that I do like music like this more, I guess it is potentially one of my favourites up until this point.

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.

Imminent Death And Bubbles

~ tryingartist ~ 1 Comment

An instrumental in two parts: Imminent Death, and Bubbles. The two parts are pretty similar, the chords remaining the same all the way through. It just gets slightly jumpy and echo-y for a while, as I play a guitar solo of sorts, and a blues bass riff. I thought it sounded like bubbles, I added Bubbles to the title, and the track was born.

It’s boring.

There’s a bit of dread there, but not enough to sustain your attention.

There’s a pedal note going through the whole song, which is something I like, but it isn’t enough to sustain your attention.

As in many other of my songs (to this day I am guilty of this), I have layered many tracks together, rather than compose something genuinely engaging on a single track, perhaps to conceal my inability to really ‘play’ ‘any’ ‘of’ ‘the’ ‘instruments’. The song is textured, but ultimately a bit boring. It doesn’t sustain your attention.

I think the song’s tone is infecting my writing. Finding it hard to be. Flowing and. funny.

Here is an example of the opposite of what I do in this and many other tracks:

There are essentially four clearly defined instrument parts, with a subtle pad coming in after the bridge in the middle. They just really work together. The production on each instrument is perfect, and the main synth melody is so catchy you want to hear it every time. The song goes on for almost 7 minutes! But it sustains your attention. Well, for me it does.

 

At 2.47 I do a drum fill which also appears a couple of times in this other song, one which sustains your attention quite effectively:
(2.47 could maybe be called the ‘climax’ of the song, in the same sense that a re-run of American Dad could be deemed ‘the greatest television moment of all time’.)

 

And finally, here’s Super Hans with the formula I was going for when writing Imminent Death And Bubbles: ‘the longer the note, the more dread’.

 

Lacking any real emotional contact with this song, any concrete memories to go along with it, or any real feelings of pride and/or dismay, I sneakily saturated this blog post with high-octane video content. I don’t know if you noticed, but it worked extremely well. This is a gimmick deployed by Buzzfeed, and the rest of the internet world. It is perhaps comparable to the abundance of ‘hooks’ in many of the catchiest pop songs. Features which GRAB and then SUSTAIN your attention.

LOOK BELOW FOR A FEW EXCITING AND SHOCKING EXAMPLES OF THIS:

 

 

Little Green Lane

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Up next is possibly the wettest song I’ve ever written. Well, top 3 at least. It’s drenched with wetness. It wouldn’t be dry if you covered the mp3 in towels, dropped it in the Sahara, and told it to find its way home.

The title, I imagine, was meant to be figurative. Like ‘Little Green Lane’ represents this sort of twee suburb-y existence that the love-torn and anguished hero flees from to seek life anew in the unknown. Unfortunately, because the song is literally dripping wet, it trips and falls into the bottomless pit it hopes to escape from. The song becomes the very nightmare I’m singing about. Everything about it, from the trudging opening chord sequence, to that pleading lead guitar line in the 2nd verse (ok, it is also the best bit of the song, but: wet) to the lyrics (‘I don’t want to spoil your pretty plan’ is grotesquely emo. And I really don’t consider my past self to be an emo in any way. And then the chorus – I’m basically just listing modes of transport. PICK ONE ) – all of these things lack any sort of punch whatsoever. It must be the most insipid dramatic walk-out of all time.

‘Ohhhh noooooo we’re fighting again. Ohhhhhh noooooooooooooooooooo. Ahhhh how annoyyyyyinnnggg. I’m gonna have to go to the train station, goodbye forever.’

‘Well where are you going?’

‘Not quite sure yet. Somewhere very very far awayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy’

‘Wouldn’t the plane be more time efficient? Might also cost less, you know what trains are like these days. Especially if it’s a domestic flight.’

‘You’re probably right yes. Well either way I’m leaving Little Green Lane. I’m off to the plane station. GOODBYE FOREVER’

‘What’s Little Green Lane?’

(wiping a solitary tear from his uncertain eyes, our trembling hero shuffles awkwardly to the door, in a noncommittal sort of way)

Perhaps the most damning thing I can say about this song is that my most significant memories of it involve me trying to listen to it when out and about, and being frustrated that it was too quiet on my iPod. That’s basically it.

 

However, you know, it is a proper song. It goes verse chorus verse chorus in a pleasing way. If Adele sung it it would be passable. And, on a production level, it is a bit of a step up from most of the earlier tracks. The drumming is relatively tight and appropriate. I’m playing piano, which will slowly but surely take over from guitar as the dominant instrument in my music. It has a lead guitar part, which is quite a rarity in the discography (again, wet, but sweet. Or: sweet, therefore wet.) NOTE: I genuinely just noticed the guitar solo before the second verse for the first time since I started writing this. It took me roughly 5 listens. Incredibly appropriate blended solo, or completely ineffectual filler? You decide.

 

‘I’m leaving through the raaaiiiiinnnn.’

Course you are, you wet shit.

‘

The D ‘n’ D Song

~ tryingartist ~ 2 Comments

Another joke song, the ‘D’s stand for ‘Death and Destruction’. I think I found this amusing because the song features happy chords and a xylophone (or is it marimba? I can’t remember, it was a software instrument anyway, played through the laptop keyboard). Can a xylophone sound sad? A lack of research tells me no, no it can’t.

I’ll confess that while making this project I sigh a little whenever I get to a joke song like this. ‘Huhhhhhhhhhhhh’

I keep waiting for that great leap forward in musical prowess. Something to make the readers go ‘oh, he ain’t just a pretty font with mostly banal observations about himself, this guy actually has talent!’ Will we ever get there? Perhaps not, you may not like what I become.

In the meantime, if you love xylophones, easy happy harmonies, and punchlines that are frankly quite offensive when you listen to them again 8 years later, then you will simply love The D ‘n’ D Song.

The instrument parts are reasonably neatly put together, I’ll give it that. I have good memories of this song. At the time the harmonies sounded better than most I had done before, and the drumming is pretty much all in time. But joke songs don’t age well. Well, some do. But although the fact that it’s a joke shields it from some of the disdain I have for my earlier earnest efforts, it also dilutes the emotional pull I feel towards it. I listen and I’m like ‘there I go, being an inconsequential dick again’. At least when I tried to write proper music you can hear that bittersweet desperation of a recorded performance dying valiantly, over and over again. There’s something noble about it. I really am trying. The sarcastic sneer implied by this song ruins that for me. It’s still dying, just not nobly.

 

NB: I just tried for a full 4 minutes to find a sad xylophone piece. I tried everything, from typing ‘sad xylophone’ into YouTube, to typing ‘sad xylophone music’ into YouTube. I found absolutely nothing. This is the best I could find, so I think I’ve proven my point beyond doubt:

NB2: I stand corrected. Apparently it’s a marimba. Can marimbas sound sad? The jury’s out for now

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: