What's been happening

I really don't like it when I read a blog entry which starts "It's been quite a while since I last posted here, but I've been too busy to have the time". One of the points about blogging is to write about what one is busy with. Well, I too have been busy over the past month, although busy with nothing which is interesting to read about. All work and no play doesn't make for interesting reading.

Also I was ill with tonsillitis which kept me in bed for a few days; when I ventured out into the world, it seems that I immediately caught a cold, so these two ailments kept me very weak for over a week.

At the moment it seems unlikely that I'll write any new songs in the near future, so I'm keeping my musical chops updated by working on songs written by other people. At a rate of one song per month, I should have a completed disc by autumn, although copyright restrictions mean that no one will ever get the chance to hear the songs.... Amongst the songs which I've already recorded are "My cherie amour" (Stevie Wonder), "I'll never fall in love again" (Bacharach / David), "Close watch" (John Cale) and a pair of Richard Thompson songs, "Withered and died", and "That's all, close the door, say amen".

Over the past week I've been working on an early Peter Hammill song (written in collaboration with David Jackson), "Out of my book". As I've been unable (and unwilling) to copy the exact rhythms of the original, I've had to produce my own version of the song, which one might say is the raison d'etre of cover versions. Changing the song's rhythm means also changing the vocal phrasing, which is often the hardest part of recording these covers. I recorded a fairly successful vocal (actually comprised of two takes patched together because I blew a line at the beginning of the third verse) on Saturday; after having listened to it many times, I've decided to punch in a correction at the end of the second verse where my phrasing was poor. Apart from that, the biggest change is substituting the harmony in the middle eight for the original tune. I think that the impetus for this came from rereading the VdGG book; Judge Smith makes a comment about Hammill substituting the harmony for the tune in one of their joint songs, and I thought that I would try this out myself.