The power of regret, and a proto-song

Astute readers of this blog may have noticed that some of my lyrics have been influenced by books - 'You should have known', 'What Alice forgot' and 'Normal people' (in my defense, I note that Kate Bush wrote songs inspired by films). At the moment I am reading a fascinating book,  'The power of regret' by Daniel H. Pink, and I'm fairly sure that by the time I finish this book, I will have some ideas for song lyrics. One possible title that I noted is 'Rifts and drifts' - regrets about friendships that were torn apart by some extreme event (rifts) and friendships that simply slipped away (drifts - note the Hammill reference).

As opposed to the other three books that I mentioned, 'Regret' is a non-fiction book. It's the type of book that I very much enjoy reading: simplified psychology. Most (if not all) of Pink's books lie in this area - I have on my shelves a book called 'A whole new mind' that dates from the days when I used to buy real books. This is a book well worth reading.

I used to think that I was full of regret (as are the people appearing in the book, naturally), but I've been thinking about this for the past few days and there doesn't seem to be anything that I regret not doing since I emigrated to Israel, although there are a few things that I regret doing or saying. Most of the regret (if any is left from those days) is to be found in my London period. I don't regret emigrating, I don't regret living on kibbutz, I don't regret marrying my wife, I don't regret leaving one kibbutz to live on another (a very good move, in fact). There was a time in about 2008 when I spent a weekend seriously considering whether to leave the company for which I worked (and still do) and move to a Priority consulting company; I didn't leave but I don't regret doing so. 

Anyway: there is a good chance that lyrics will arise from this book. This is just as well as the other day I played some ideas on the piano and recorded them. On Thursday evening I made a bare bones sequence of these ideas that I improved greatly on Friday morning, although towards the afternoon and evening I was beginning to have second thoughts, not only about this emerging song but about other songs that I have written. The tunes seem to be too dense - I don't know how exactly to describe this - not leaving much room for instruments to punch through, or even to breathe. I heard something on the radio during these hours, noting how few notes were sung to a bar, and I realised that I don't do this. This train of thought crystallised when I read how John Lennon had to add extra beats to 'Across the universe' because he didn't have enough time to breathe between lines.

So before I went to bed, I tried playing a new version of this proto-song where there is one chord per bar and the melody is more spread out and starts on the second or third beat of the opening bar of each phrase. I have yet to sequence this version but I think that it will sound better than the first version. It starts with a sequence in E Dorian (Em D Bm A) but then there's an interesting sequence of secondary dominants - Gm C F BbMaj7 Bm7b5 E Asus4 A. Obviously BbMaj7 is not the secondary dominant of Bm7b5 - in fact, the two chords contain almost the same notes: the Bb of the first chord is sharpened to B - but makes for an interesting change.

No doubt I'll be tinkering with this proto-song during the coming weeks. And no, I have no regrets about changing the harmonic rhythm.

[Note: I had literally finished writing the above and formatting it when there was a power cut. Fortunately everything has been saved.]