As today is Saturday and I went to bed relatively late last night, I allowed myself to sleep until I awoke naturally at 7:15 am. Actually, I only partially awoke naturally; the other part that woke me was the sound of the rain that was falling outside. We have had a very dry winter so far, but on Tuesday the rain started to fall and didn't really stop until Thursday evening. Friday was dry, but again the rain fell on and off all day today.
I waited for the rain to stop so that I could take the dog for a walk without her getting wet, but the weather had other ideas, so eventually I buttoned up and took her to the local school, which is two or three minutes away from my house. There is a long corridor that I can walk up and down, sheltered from the rain. It's not as good as a real walk but it's better than nothing . Later on during the day I was able to take advantage of the few dry periods to take the dog for real walks (enabling her to do her business properly).
During breakfast I watched a YouTube video analysing part of the song 'Starting over' by John Lennon. My wife was also listening but she didn't understand the point of the video; "how does she [the presenter] know what Lennon intended", she asked, missing the discussion of the interesting chord progression.
I listened and internalised, for later on in the day, I sat at the piano and started messing around with some of the chords from that song, specifically A A+ Bm9 E. I shortly found a tune that would sit on these chords (not the tune of 'Starting over'), but intuitively decided that I too would let the melody dictate the chords. So after two iterations of those four chords, I found myself adding a little phrygian flavour by descending to Dm before returning to E; the tune again went down to Dm, this time for twice as long. Although the phrase ended up on the note E, I decided to harmonise this with a C chord (half a bar) before a short triplet turn over Bb (I realised a bit later that this comes from Fauré's "Pavane") and a resolution to A, the tonic (a slightly weird cadence). The second time around, after the A chord, I found myself improvising something similar with Gm and A: again, I let the tune (the same phrase but first starting on D, then on F and finally on G) dictate the harmony. The third time around, the tune ended on a B that I harmonised with a B minor chord, and thence to E, creating a ii V I turnaround.
After playing this through a few times, I recorded it onto my phone then started the task of transcribing the music. I discovered that the four chord opening required two bars of each chord to support the melody, whereas the phrygian part varied from two bars per chord down to two chords per bar. The Gm/A part was one bar per chord. I created only a simple chords and melody version; I'll leave arranging it for later.
Thinking about the tune later on, I'll definitely have to lower it by about a fourth (i.e. from A down to E). The highest note is an F, that is far too high for me; if I lower this to C, then the lowest note will be an A (an octave and a bit below that C), fitting my range perfectly.
I haven't done much musically in the past two months, both because I've had plenty of consulting work, but also because I have two completely arranged songs that can't be recorded as I don't have any ideas as to what their words could be. As it happens, this new tune may get words quite quickly: while I was playing it, the words "What makes you think that our time together" fell quite naturally on the tune. I can definitely make something from this; whilst I could be the cruel one, trying to get my partner to understand that 'our time' is over, I could also be the person who is being told that 'our time' is over. This role playing may make writing the lyrics a bit easier.
| Blog # | Date | Title | Tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| 448 | An untypical Thursday | ERP, Sandy Denny, Peter Hammill, Diet | |
| 804 | 04/02/2015 | Copper socks (2) | Health |
| 925 | 04/02/2016 | Intermediate submission not accepted | DBA |
| 1469 | 04/02/2022 | Completing a new song ("Blind as a bat") | Song writing, Home recording |
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