Part three: jugs, water and light.
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A second song written and recorded while camping, my starting prompt was brittle.
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I started with the word draught from the previous piece, and then opened the book The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (highly recommended by the way) to random pages and chose the first word on the pages starting with each letter of draught. The words led me here, and I let myself just hit random keys on the piano for part of the accompaniment as I'd run out of energy to nut out something more functional.
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My first song of April, and I decided to take flood as my theme from the previous day. I did quite a lot of writing exercises but they were all ending up very serious and depressing, and I didn't really feel in the mood for a serious or depressing song. I gave myself happy flood as a new prompt and ended up writing about the moment someone tells you they love you. Perhaps it's the cheerful and simple diatonic harmony, or the swing feel, or the repetition of the phrase "I love you", but it absolutely lifted my mood after the emotional ups and downs of the past week and the chaos of Friday's flood.
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This is Sunday's piece, and I had regained a little of my mojo for this one. I started with the theme clumsy from the previous day's piece, and did a three minute timed writing exercise. I then took all the nouns, verbs and adjectives from the result of that writing exercise and created word pairs with them. I used two of the pairs, "somewhere rain" and "another kitchen", as prompts for two additional three-minute writing exercises, and the results of those exercises led to this song. The day after I wrote this song it actually did rain in Melbourne, so I like to think I summoned the rain with my song.
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This project is as much about practicing performing as it is practicing composing. I was really struggling to get through a successful take of this one last night. I kept making small mistakes, and then rather than letting them go they were growing in my mind, forming distractions, and leading to larger mistakes and abandoned takes. The clock was edging toward midnight when I finally had a take I was happy with. I'm still learning ways to manage all the mental stuff that goes along with performing, particularly performing for recording, which I find more difficult than performing live. This project is definitely helping, although it's slightly stressful putting these raw recordings out into the public space where they can potentially exist forever.
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Sunday's song, continuing with the moon theme. The rhythm and harmony were pulled from serial composition using the word moon, and the unusual 9/8 ostinato took a lot of practice to sing over. I'm not going to write any more about this one, as I need to take some time to relax before starting today's song, and it's supposed to be a public holiday today in Melbourne.
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I live in Melbourne's southern suburbs, and for those unfamiliar with our city there is a strange North vs South divide that sees people hating on residents on the other side of the river to themselves. I have lived on both sides, and while I was a North-sider I spent a lot of time thinking the South was inferior. But then I moved across town and realised that I much preferred the South, and I barely think about the North at all, except when I have to travel over there to play a gig (which I'm doing tomorrow). Because while I prefer to live South of the river Melbourne's live music scene is concentrated in the North.
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I considered leaving this to tomorrow morning to record, simply because I would have had more fun if I could crank my amp a bit. Once I start doing that, however, there's nothing stopping me from putting the writing off until the morning too, so I stuck to plan and recorded as quietly as I could.
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This one was recorded at about 1:30am, which is by far the latest I've stayed up writing and recording for this project so far. At about midnight when it was only half done I crashed, and was almost asleep at the piano. I didn't like the melody, I had holes in my lines of lyrics that I just couldn't fill, and I was annoyed that I hadn't captured the mood from my initial writing exercises either musically or lyrically. Basically, my inner critic was telling me everything was crap, and that I should just scrap it all and start again.
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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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Just a quick post today, before I go and get a decent night's sleep. I kept on with the sea theme, and this piece is a kind of continuation of yesterday's story. Sonically it's structured in three sections: the sound of the waves above water, then the sound in your ears when you plunge under the water, and finally the sound of bubbles as they rush from your mouth.
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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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Today is the first day I really didn't want to sit down and work. Really, really didn't want to. My schedule has been fairly light the past few weeks as most of my music teaching doesn't resume until the school term starts back again, but I am playing at a wedding tomorrow and spent most of today preparing for that. I had considered building rest days into this project - one day a month perhaps - but momentum is an easy thing to lose. One day off the wagon and you start to want another, and another and another. I have no idea when I'll fit tomorrow's song in, but that's a challenge for the morning.
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