Here's yesterday's song. It's late, so I won't write too much, instead I'll just share the lyrics. Very loosely inspired by the etymology of Tuesday, a love song
I am the square of sun
That moves across the room
Slow and languid
This one came out easily, unlike most of my recent attempts. My starting prompt was venetian blinds.
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It's school holidays and my teaching load has lightened up, so I spent a leisurely amount of time on this song. I have found through this project that I often run out of steam half way through a composition, particularly when it comes to writing second verses of lyrics. All my best ideas from writing exercises usually end up in the first verse or section of lyrics, and then there is pressure for the second part to equal the first in quality, and also move the song along somehow. I find a more traditional pop song structure much harder to write in a day, but these less traditionally structured songs come much easier. I treated this one a little like a painting, with both verses adding new layers to the picture.
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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 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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One of the difficulties with this project is that each day's work is brand new. Starting from a seed, a new piece of music must be realised in whatever time I have available that day. This means that more complicated ideas that need some time to workshop are not really compatible with the way I'm working right now. There is the possibility of writing a song in sections, adding or revising sections with each new day's work, and this would be within the rules I've set myself. So far, however, I haven't worked like this, as I'm finding myself excited by the possibility of doing something new each day. I'm only 16% of my way through the project, so perhaps that will change as I find myself running out of ideas that can be executed in a day.
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This project is making me really aware of the day-to-day fluctuations in emotional and physical energy I experience, and the very real effect that energy level has on my work. I wrote yesterday morning about feeling burnt out, which I absolutely was the day before when I was trying to work on piece #47. Last night, however, I felt entirely the opposite. I was refreshed, ready and excited, and looking forward to an evening by myself in my studio. I had tidied up a bit, which definitely helped entice me into my newly neat space, and I was anticipating the enjoyment of the night's work the same way you'd anticipate the enjoyment of a party. I even indulged the Saturday night vibe with some fairy lights.
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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 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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Today marks the first day of month two of this year-long project. I should probably write a bit of a reflection on month one, but I might do that as a separate post tomorrow when I have a some free time. Today I'll keep my writing about my composition, and I might get a little nerdy in today's post. If you're one of my non-musician friends you might want to skip through to the bit about the lyrics.
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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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I won't write too much tonight, instead I'll direct you over to Rehearsal Magazine, who have just published an interview I did with them this week. I will say that today life took over, and I was left with only a small window of time for today's composition. That window didn't coincide with my feeling particularly creative or inspired, so I forced myself through a few 90 second lyric writing exercises and then improvised with results.
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One of the things you learn while studying jazz is how to be complicated. Every time I write something simple I have this voice in the back of my mind telling me it's not good enough because it's not full of crazy chords or in some kind of weird time signature. It's a ridiculous mindset, as there is plenty of beauty and skill in composing simply, but I really have to work hard to convince myself of that when I'm in the middle of writing and my inner critic is judging like mad.
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I worked out today that I have been writing songs for about fifteen years, which sounds like an amazingly long time, and I feel I should be much better at it than I am by now. One chunk of that fifteen year period was plagued with horrible writers' block, which was largely due to not knowing how to write about things that were not highly and specifically personal. Learning how to separate myself from the songs and treat them more like works of fiction really helped me to get past that period, and now my writing tends to draw as much from my imagination as it does my own life experiences. Opening up space for my imagination means I can turn to books, films, mythology, poetry or art for stories and ideas, without having to wait for something in my own life to throw me a spark of inspiration.
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I have been binge-listening to a couple of really fantastic music-related podcasts recently. The first is Susan De Weger's Beyond the Stage, which explores the way music training can enhance careers beyond the traditional performance-based options that are becoming increasingly rare. The second is Ben Turner's Double Depresso, which explores mental health in the arts. I happen to be meeting up with Ben tomorrow morning to have a chat for a future episode, but the interview I listened to this morning with musician-turned-psychologist Fran felt particularly relevant to this project. There was a lot of chat about the perils of social media, in particular the addictive nature of the "like" culture. So far I've settled into a fairly robust writing routine, however the public nature of the project is not something I have quite figured out yet. I spoke a little in a previous post about it giving me an audience to feel accountable to and help keep me on track with my daily deadline, but I didn't really address the darker side.
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Today marks the end of week two, and I'm feeling awfully burnt out already. I'm mentally, physically and vocally exhausted from a six hour gig yesterday, and all I wanted today was to have a day off. I have to be kind to myself though. This project was never going to be easy, and will ebb and flow with my mental and physical energy levels, and it's something I have to learn to work with.
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Day 8, and I still haven't quite got my inner critic under control. It sneaks up on me in the middle of experimenting with an idea and tells me it isn't good enough. Or it's not "me" enough. Or it's too much like something else I've written. Or it's just not very interesting. There's a very strong personal element that comes into play too, the idea isn't good, original or interesting enough and therefore you as a person aren't either. If you let them take over, these feelings can stop any kind of creative progress in its tracks.
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I have a young guitar student who is incredibly cute, and likes to take off his shoes before he starts his lesson. He says he's "just not comfortable" until he does. He always informs me while removing his footwear that he has tan-bark in his socks, and he inspired some of the lyrics for this piece
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