My starting prompt doorway led me to this ghost story, which formed the basis of my writing exercises. I eventually gave up trying to turn my scribblings into some kind of traditional song and just had fun with my effects pedals instead.
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Thursday's piece. I continued on with the whisper theme and one of the words that appeared in my mind map was Will-'o-the-wisp, or a mysterious ghostly light that lures travellers from safe paths. Other words and concepts from the mind map also made it into the lyrics, including spider silk, secret, float and shout/cry.
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When I started this project back in January I was still sailing along on the time-rich bliss of summer school holidays. I had a great routine of waking up, practicing mandolin or guitar with coffee, doing some exercise while listening to a podcast, showering, practicing some more before and after lunch, then working on my daily song in the evening. But then the school term and private teaching started up again and my routine got thrown into turbulence and I haven't been able to steady it since.
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One of the songwriting tools I use regularly is an etymological dictionary. Looking at the origin of words is a really fascinating way of finding links between seemingly unrelated objects and ideas. My original starting point for this piece was umbrella, and the origin of that word comes from umbra, which is related to shadows and also to phantoms and ghosts. It is an interesting coincidence that the words shade and umbrella are linked, as shade also appeared in the previous day's piece. I took the ghostly route, and worked off the idea of trying to imagine a loved one back into existence.
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I composed and recorded this one after having a wonderful chat with an old friend of mine for next week's episode of Mind Over Myth (which is now available for you to subscribe to on iTunes). He stayed for dinner, so once again I was chipping away at my daily song late at night. Since transitioning to a career as a musician and music teacher I have struggled with the change in schedule. Unlike my old 9 - 5 jobs, I do the bulk of my work in the late afternoons and evenings. The habit of many years' relaxing in the evenings is a hard one to break, and I feel strange and guilty if I sit down in the morning or early afternoon to watch a film, knit or sew, or just do something mind numbing for a few hours. All the late-night songwriting is taking its toll, however, and I realise I really do need some downtime. I spent a few hours before lunch today watching Vice documentaries, and there was one about Romanian witches that stuck in my mind. In particular, it was the idea of the witches tearing open the sky to read the future that really struck me.
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So far the most reliable source of inspiration for this project has been folklore. I'm not sure if it's because I feel comfortable working in that kind of lyrical and thematic realm, or if it's just what I'm interested in right now, but I turned there again for today's piece. I started with the word skin from yesterday, and the first Google search result for "skin folklore" was selkie, which proved a fertile place to start.
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Good morning! Here's a belated post for yesterday's song. I feel like I need to prove somehow that I did write and record it yesterday, but you'll just have to take my word for it. I didn't finish getting the video ready until well after 1am last night, so I pressed upload and went to bed. I had to re-watch it this morning to remember what I had done, and discovered there is some grammatical weirdness at the end of the lyrics that is going to irritate me all day. I had been wrestling with the end of the lyrics for a while, and in the end I called time and just went with what I had. I'm glad I didn't just leave out the second verse completely, as I now have a rough draft that I can polish up.
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As I start to write this it's just gone 1am. I think every song so far has been written and recorded before midnight, but today I didn't set up my camera until well after 12am. I started working on the song at about 8pm with lots of enthusiasm, but that quickly turned to frustration and I spent far too long languishing in pages of failed ideas.
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Week three down, only 49 to go. The end is nowhere in sight, but I'm still mostly enjoying myself. Yesterday was a first for me in terms of improvising on guitar and voice at the same time, today's piece is a first in that I've never really used my loop pedal with a guitar before, only with my voice. Each of these daily compositions give me a chance to try out new ideas, but they also give me a chance to struggle at actually performing them without much practice.
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My friend Emilee Seymour (who is a wonderful multi-disciplinary artist) told me in an email the other day she was intrigued by the writing exercises I've mentioned a few times in this blog, so I thought I'd use that as an excuse to talk about them in a little more detail today. First, my connection to yesterday comes by way of dandelions, which are part of the daisy family. I dipped into the Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore and the Occult Sciences again, which told me "it is very unlucky to transplant wild daisies into a cultivated garden". Using this idea of trying to tame a wild daisy I conducted two three-minute writing exercises, the first prompted by wild daisy and the second by cultivated daisy.
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I dived a little way back in to my secret past with today's piece. My music degree was my fourth attempt at tertiary study, and the only degree I managed to complete. When I was much younger I studied almost all of a textile design diploma, but gave it up because it was destroying my love of making things. I'm not sure why studying music didn't do the same, perhaps just because I was older and more sure of my path.
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Week three begins, and I started today refreshed and ready to write again. The last few days had left me feeling quite stale, so I decided I needed to introduce some fresh creative material into my process. From yesterday I took the idea of the night, and did some quick and dirty Google research into night-related mythology. I was intrigued by Nyx, the Goddess of the night, and so I used her as the basis for this piece. In particular I was interested in the ways she might bring on the night, by physically casting a veil of darkness over the sky.
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