I've been listening on and off for the past few months to some of Carole King's early 70s output, including the best selling 'Tapestry' album. I have to admit that I don't like most of the songs, but then I'm not in the target demographic for them. There is one song that I admire, that sounds to me as somewhat atypical for CK: "Song of long ago", from her "Music" album.
This song features a few interesting chords, so in order to assuage my curiosity, I looked at an online chord chart that included the obscure A11 chord. As I couldn't match what I was hearing to the chord chart, I found a midi file of this song and looked at the voicing of this chord: A (in the bass) G (a seventh above) B D. If one considers the A to be the root of the chord, then G is the 7th, B the 9th and D the 11th, and so A11 is an accurate description. But when I played this on the piano and looked at it, I saw a G chord with A in the bass, aka G/A. Neither of these chords sound to me like what is being played; it was only when I rethought the chord did I understand: it's a D chord second inversion (that's the A) with a suspended 4th (G) and an added 6th (B): Dsus4sus6. Anyway.... Another partially interesting song of CK's is "So far away"; at least, the first line is interesting, with a 9th in the melody.
I actually saw Carole King in concert in July (?) 1971, along with James Taylor and their joint backing band that probably included Danny Kortchmar, Leland Sklar and Russ Kunkel - top session men. I only remember a few things about this concert: every song would be ended by the guitarists jumping in to the air then playing the final chord. It was very hot that evening.
Back to the new song: I thought it was time to write a slow shuffle and I wanted to play around with some of these harmonic ideas. I too began the melody with a 9th (a D over a C chord) but with differences to "So far away". I played around with various melodies and chords until I had something interesting, then started sequencing. Later on, I realised that one melody line is the same as part of the piano coda of "Layla", albeit set to different chords. Much later on, I noticed that one section of four bars has the same changes as Peter Green's "Man of the world" - this was completely accidental and coincidental. In the end, my kind of song is based on chord changes, and there are only so many ways of combining them. I aim for interesting 'building bricks' and these can't always be unique. Another part of the song has a Newman cliché in it (Dm Em F Em): see, I'm copying from myself.
I was aiming for a cool, minimalistic, slow shuffle, but it took some time to get there. The first complete version was a good start but not minimalistic enough; after a walk with the dog, I realised that I had to spread the instrumentation out more. Once I had the music track down, it was time to start writing words. Years ago I wrote a few lines about the winter sun, but these didn't lead anywhere. I thought that it would be a good idea to contrast the sun with the full moon that we recently had, but I couldn't come up with any lines that fit the song's rhythm. At one stage it seemed that the lyrics might go in a completely different direction, but again I had problems in stringing more than a few lines together.
The other day, when listening to the instrumental track with the flute playing the melody, I improvised a new line that certainly was interesting. On this basis, I managed to concentrate long enough in order to write the 27 lines (three verses of nine lines each) required. I then took the dog for a walk and saw the sun 'sliding under the horizon'; coming back, I changed maybe 60% of the lyrics. I'm not going to quote them here because they're not something that I'm particularly proud of, and they certainly don't have "me" in them.
Yesterday I spent some time recording the vocals, then even more time mixing the vocals to approximate the sound that I had in my head. I didn't get all the way, but it's still pretty good. This is probably the slowest song that I've ever sequenced, at a bare 64 bpm (beats per minute); when I first started sequencing, songs were at a speed of 120 bpm, then they slowed down to around 100 bpm. Most of my recent songs have been around 90 bpm, but 64 bpm is ... really ... slow. Interestingly, when singing I found the song to be too slow, but it sounds all right when listening to it. There was a song a few years ago that I found to be too fast when singing, but again the final track sounds all right.
That makes six new songs that I've written and recorded since last January. There aren't any old songs that I'm interested in rerecording, either because the songs don't talk to me anymore or else because I think that I can't improve on the existing recordings.
Here's the winter sun setting in all its glory.
No comments:
Post a Comment