A chord taken from The Cause Of Your Calluses, and my clock as a metronome. I only recorded one take: the lyrics and melody were improvised, and I treated the performance like a meditation.
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I did my best to perform to the rhythm of my knitting. It's a lace pattern, and slightly fiddly, which makes this piece nicely wonky.
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An ode to dreaming, recorded while the sun was setting.
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A song! As much as I have been enjoying playing around with light it also feels nice to spend time on some composition. I was woken very early the other morning, and sitting waiting for the sun to rise I began daydreaming about being on a plane to somewhere else in the world. I took light as my theme from the previous piece and spun that together with my travel imaginings. I was originally playing this on piano, but something about it sounded too much like musical theatre so I rearranged it for vocal loops and bass. I was back to late night recording, so everything is played very quietly.
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A continuation from the previous day's wish. What would happen if I didn't write a song? Nothing, nothing at all. And nothing would happen if I wrote a bad one either, as this proves. I randomly bashed at the piano, and still lived to see another day.
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This one is something of a merrythought, and definitely a wish I would have made if I'd cooked a roast chicken and won the wish-end of the wishbone.
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From the previous day's gelatin to wishbone, dug out of a hot roast chicken. In my bone-related research I discovered that the wishbone used to be called a "merrythought", which is kind of nice.
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A very quick one, somehow connected to kaleidoscope but I can't remember now how I got here.
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For the next small set of pieces I worked with the theme vista. To help the difficulties I've been having motivating myself to write I decided to implement some rigour to my process. I adopted the pomodoro technique, and chunked my work into 25 minute blocks, both songwriting and all the other tasks I have on my plate at the moment. I have literally been carrying a kitchen timer around the house with me so that I can set it when I get started on something. This has made the last few days fairly manageable, and I have been able to maintain my focus for the short blocks of time.
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The third in my series of spider-themed improvisations. This piece is a little mantra to myself to simply let go of all the music I've made so far, and to not get caught up in trying to music that will equal or better it. Just keep making.
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Back at home, Monday. Following on from the shell-on-the-windowsill theme of the previous day with trinket on a shelf.
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The most song-like song of the week, on ukulele because it was easy to play curled up on the couch. My studio feels too much like work at the moment.
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Part III in a mini series, an actual dream. I've been having lots of bizarre ones lately, I think my imagination is on overdrive.
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Yesterday I had to go into one of those huge city office towers to drop off some documents. It was the kind with a concierge in the lobby to direct you to the correct floor, and a stream of suits, motorcycle couriers and cycling lycra coming and going through the glass lifts. I spent a large chunk of my twenties quite unhappy in office buildings like this, and whenever I end up back inside one I feel very uncomfortable as the negative memories come flooding back in.
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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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Two months of songs down, and it took me all this time to do something on ukulele. I have never really enjoyed playing uke, as I find it uncomfortable to hold, and just use it for teaching. But yesterday I finally went and got a strap button installed, and it made such a difference. While I was studying at the VCA Jo Lawry gave a master class, and spoke about the advantages of writing songs on an unfamiliar instrument. For her it was guitar, and she enjoyed just putting her fingers onto the instrument and letting sounds guide her. The ukulele plays a similar role for me, as I find its tuning very foreign. This song came about from simply putting my fingers in random places on the instrument and letting my ear be my guide.
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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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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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