piano

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.

Very Kind

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

 

This song is the most Trying Artist thing imaginable:

In and amongst the dreary, badly sung melodies, the incomprehensible lyrics, the usual messy instruments, the 5 minutes of underwhelming overkill, there is a saxophone.

So there I am, Jack of some trades, master of absolutely nothing, recording a song on piano, bass, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, drums, and vocals, playing each one badly. And I decide to pick up the sax.

I remember the week. I think it was summer, my Dad’s office was swelteringly hot. Or maybe I’m just imagining that because the song I decided to learn was Summertime. But anyway, I picked up his sax. Above all I remember the intense vibration that would sometimes occur against my lip when I pressed it a certain way against the reed. It tickled so much I had to stop playing. How do you stop this happening? I’ll probably never know. But I learnt Summertime, and played it a handful of times. Then I took the sax downstairs, and used it in a song. A few long notes, adding an extra layer of sludge onto that chorus.

I must have stood back and surveyed the scene, sonically. ‘Ahhh, another instrument. Good.’

There was always part of me that knew the most impressive part of my musical output was the volume of it – both in terms of instruments within the songs, and the number of songs in total. So I’d improve those things. Adding some piano, adding more layers of guitars (because I couldn’t play anything interesting enough with one layer). Getting a saxophone in there. Half finishing a song to show it to people as quickly as possible, never perfecting anything. Ignoring technique. Inundating my life with musical noise, too much to really hear how good it was.

I don’t really regret this. I’m the same with all things. I like the bigger picture. I like to throw things together in a disorganised way, skipping from one idea to the next when I think of them, not resting on the first one until it’s right. But it certainly made my music shit for a long time. Once, when I was 15, I saw that my ex-girlfriend talking about this guy’s music on Myspace. It made me really jealous, because she used to listen to MY music. He was a friend of hers, and his song was a simple pop number, just voice and acoustic guitar. Guitar played nicely, vocals sung sweetly. I defensively dismissed his music instantly – ‘It’s shit. It’s just stupid pop. It’s bland. It’s too simple.’ But I listened to it a lot of times, all the while seething.

What I was forced to acknowledge, although I didn’t want to, is that if you do something simple, and do it well, people react to it better than they do to a loud mess of ideas.

I acknowledged it briefly, then went back to doing exactly what I’d always done.

Here is an example of randomly added saxophone which works a bit better:

RABBITS IN THE RAIN

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

My sister’s friend heard me playing guitar once and asked me to write her a song. I said ok give me a minute, and walked off. She laughed, I laughed, we all laughed. 2 days later I came back to her with RABBITS IN THE RAIN. Title in capitals, presumably to add a bit of gravitas to a theme I was worried people might treat with too much levity.

A tragedy in bunny’s clothing, this is a song about the voracious and perverse appetite of consumerism, the desperate struggle of the oppressed against systemic oppressive forces, and rabbits dancing around having a lovely time when it’s a bit wet.

That last part of the theme is covered succinctly but repeatedly in the choruses. I obviously deemed ‘rabbits in the rain’ description enough to translate the complex, multi-layered visions I’m sure I was having at the time. And I was right. Rabbits are so heavily connotative in our society that merely mentioning them over a couple of happy chords is enough to suggest a cute scene, maybe springtime, bucolic splendour, nature running its course, a world untouched by evil. The rain is a slight spanner though. Are they happy in the rain? Is it Bambi Little April Showers, or is it a darkening foreboding storm?

Regardless, we all know what happens in Bambi.

Boom, enter the minor chord, and the verse begins. It starts off harmlessly enough:

‘The rabbit has got his lettuce
And no one will take it from him
You don’t want to fight a rabbit
When it’s got its lettuce’

But in here are the corrosive seeds of greed, the same greed that will lead to Billy the Rabbit stealing from Old Farmer Jack. The same greed that will cause Billy’s death.

What can a rabbit do? His land encroached on by the constantly increasing consumption of humanity, a modern day rabbit is forced to steal in order to survive. Do you think Billy was raised to be a thief? No, Sofia the Rabbit was a rabbit of principle and dignity. But she too had to steal, eventually. And Billy sees no moral dilemma in taking back from those who ruined his last 4 homes, killed half of his friends, and left many more starving. Old Farmer Jack deserves what he’s got coming to him, Billy believes.

Trouble:

‘Old Farmer Jack
Has come out with his gun.
Run, Rabbits, run,
You don’t want Farmer Jack to get you’

And here we get the unstoppable force of the system crashing against those who would attempt to disrupt it. What is a warren of rabbits to a single human with a gun? Lettuce crumbs dropping from their panicked hungry mouths, they scatter. What started off as an act of conscious collective rebellion, a small victory in a world of grinding losses, becomes a free-for-all of selfish chaos, as rabbits clamber over each other to save their own skin. This is how the system wins. It breaks spirits. It reduces oppressed beings to their most basic and dangerous drive: to survive. In this state, even a generous, compassionate, and cute rabbit like Billy begins to display the same pernicious qualities found in the oppressors he so loathes.

Today, Billy doesn’t even get the chance to save himself. Perhaps served on a plate, with a side of the lettuce he had wanted. Maybe just discarded with the disdain Farmer Jack reserves for beings he decides are worth less than himself.

‘The rabbits were so afraid
Nowhere to go
And Billy was taken down
He was too slow’

 

 

 

CLEAN TOILETS

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https://soundcloud.com/thetryingartist/clean-toilets

Listening again to this song, my first interpretation was of the protagonist undergoing some sort of hellish muddled hallucinations. A whirlwind of pristine porcelain. A glistening white prison.

The question I was asking myself was: Why is cleanliness causing such anguish here?

And then it struck me.

The voice is not that of a prisoner, but a prison guard. This is the anguish of the obsessive compulsive totalitarian. A man so consumed by his need for order and hygiene that his world is a crashing mess of pain and dissonance.

And, whether it be the completely distorted opening, the chromatic melodies and out of tune harmonies or the stuttering, tight drumming, there is dissonance everywhere.

I don’t know whether it was deliberate or not, but the prolonged groans of ‘clean’ towards the end of the song can really only be described as ‘constipated’. It is also impossible to know now whether or not I genuinely believed ‘infestates’ was a word.

My personal memories of this song are vague. I know that I very much liked the bass line and used to play it a lot. I know that at the time I was relatively proud of the song. I thought it had intrigue. I remember telling a friend that those sliding harmonies on the ‘yeah yeah yeah’s were cool. I don’t remember whether or not he agreed.

I’m fairly certain that this song did not reflect some sort of digestive or hygienic anxiety I had.

Pain

~ tryingartist ~ 1 Comment

https://soundcloud.com/thetryingartist/pain

I absolutely hate this song.

It’s not the worst of my compositions with ‘Pain’ in the title (that will come later), but it is nonetheless incredibly irritating

We like authenticity in music. We prefer songs about heartbreak to be sung by the heartbroken. We like punk to be performed by rebels, and hip hop by people from the ghetto. Those who don’t conform to these criteria are routinely condemned as fakers.

Is it good that we judge music in this way? Not necessarily, although in many cases the expectations come from an understanding of the socio-historical foundations of a certain movement. Music is often a reaction against society. In the case of hip hop, poor black Americans began expressing themselves in a new way that was distinctly their own- by them and for them, against the backdrop of a  predominantly white society that, in the way it labelled and disadvantaged them, was institutionally racist.

So when people like Iggy Azalea imitate the rapping styles of hip hop, many people don’t just dislike it, they are actively offended by it. It demonstrates a lack of sensitivity to the social tensions at the root of hip hop culture.

And, on a less extreme level here, a song with bland lyrics about addiction and general midlife ennui sung by a whinging fresh-faced teenager isn’t that appealing. There is something about being a teenager that makes you feel the need to assert your worldly knowhow and ego to everyone. Or at least you’d think that, reading my early lyrics. My attitude and lack of self-consciousness was gradually crushed though, don’t worry.

The lyrics, in order of how annoying they sound, starting with the least annoying:

Something, and if I take it away
I don’t think you can stay
Get this thing out of your mind
What do you do when it’s taken away?
The only thing that kept you alive is ripped away
You’re bored of your car/job/house/money/wife/kids/country/world
Something to ease the pain
The pain is stronger today

This last line wins the prize of most annoying moment of the song because of its prime position at the end. The final unconvincing croak, immediately followed by a huge timing error between the guitar and drums, leaving your average listener cringing in the ears.

Good points about the song:

There are a couple of alright triplet drum fills.

Small Animals

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

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

Dark Dude

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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.

I Don’t Know

~ tryingartist ~ Leave a comment

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?

Hyper

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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^

Beginnings

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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.