https://soundcloud.com/thetryingartist/rogers-day-out

A song shrouded in mysteries, the greatest of which is: ‘Why did he bother writing, and then actually recording this song?’

The title informs us that this is to be a joke song, yet even attempts at humour are few and far between, and those that exist are half-hearted and ineffective:

‘Walk down the street about 350 metres where Roger
attempts to buy an ice-cream from a very rude foreigner.
‘That will be £1.20 sir’
Roger walks out
‘Excuse me sir, but you haven’t paid’
‘Well I don’t care’

The joke- that Roger is the rude one, not the ice-cream seller, is rehashed (unconsciously) from VeRY RuDE, and is less funny in this drab new setting.

More significant in this song than the jokes are the messy, flashy drum fills, and the instrumental beginning section of the chorus suggests to me that the song was mainly a vehicle for me to try and show off a bit on the ol’ drum kit.

However even those fills are not so  prominent. The question remains – what is the point of this song?

It begins with silence and then the sound of me moving from the computer to the drum kit, followed by metronome clicks – the level of apathy that caused me to not bother removing this 15 second intro tells you exactly how I felt about the work having finished it.

And yet…  Listening to it now there seems to be a patchwork of ideas that reflect many different aspects of my music in general. There’s the irreverent (/irrelevant) joke song, the Arrogant Rebel Figure, the emphasis on instrumental texture rather than melody, and finally, weirdly, there are brief glimmers of a sort of post-Radiohead dystopian bleak landscape/feeling that becomes increasingly apparent in my lyrics up until today.

The only memory I have of the process of writing this song is a vision evoked by the line: ‘he walks down the stairs of his life-block’: a 1984-esque grey featureless apartment block, and a street outside full of uncaring people.

This seems ridiculous now, it’s almost as if I entertained for 3 seconds the possibility of writing some poetry and then thought ‘nah fuck it, he can just buy some ice cream and call someone a foreigner.’

But then right at the end again: ‘Roger wants everything. He gets it. But he’s not…’ (enter sad minor chord implying ‘not happy’)

These aren’t good lyrics, but they’re getting closer to things that I would consider writing about now.

Here is a song with a vague lyrical feeling that has been very influential on the way I write, and which might very well reflect the inside of Roger’s head: