Way back at the end of August, I started work on a new song, whose arrangement was finished by mid-September. As usual, I had no ideas for words; this might be because of the difficult-to-sing tune that was fine to play on an instrument but made writing words hard.
Yesterday afternoon, I was thinking about Yehonatan Geffen, and how his words formed the backdrop to my adult life. Better contenders for this accolade are Peter Hammill, Richard Thompson and Randy Newman. I imagine that those born a few years before me would consider Dylan to be the soundtrack to their lives, but I can't imagine who someone born three to four (or more) years after me would choose. I resolved that this would be the idea behind the lyrics for this song.
My first task this morning was creating a simpler tune for the song: this was very easy, although in the course of singing the song, I changed part of it again. Once I had the rhythm for the tune, I was able to write the words. I don't think that they are very good, so I'm not going to quote them here (although my appreciation will probably grow in the future). In the end, the hidden inspiration is Peter Hammill; as it happens, "in the end" is one of his song titles. I had intended to throw in a few hints to songs of his; the only ones that made it are pilgrims and angels (from 'Man-Erg'). The final line at one stage was something like 'lemmings falling over the cliff edge', that would reference another song (the eponymous "Lemmings"), but this line became replaced as it didn't connect to the previous line.
Listening (once again) to the recordings of the 'First Generation' (i.e. from "The least we can do" to "Pawn Hearts"), I remember how important Peter (or more accurately, his words and music) was/were to my life at the time. He seemed like some latter day prophet, although he wasn't prophesising anything in particular (except for disaster, "Eyewitness").
Musically, the only interesting thing about the song is the bridge: this has the same chord sequence repeated three times, where the first two times are sung and the third time has a guitar solo. That in itself is unusual, but what makes it more so is a little serendipity: the first time round has the first two lines sung in half time, whereas the second time round has the complete four lines of lyrics for this section. The bridge also starts with a suspended chord, the likes of which I don't use enough.
Recording the vocal was straight-forward, probably because of the simple tune. Mixing again took some time; I was using a previously saved template that in retrospect has a noise gate not defined well. I think that I am going to save the mix template from this song as the new default template.
What lies ahead? No musical ideas at the moment. The problem is always the second chord: to a certain extent, this will set the tone of the song. Whilst walking the dog, I had the idea of I bIII vi bVII, which would be D F Gm C in the key of D. Sandy Denny has a song ('It suits me well') that starts off D F C Dm, which is similar but not the same. Time will tell.
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 476 | Two films | Films, Meg Ryan, Steig Larsson | |
| 703 | Yo'av Tibon, RIP | Personal, Obituary, Kibbutz | |
| 1127 | DBA update | DBA | |
| 1313 | Stormbringer! | Nick Drake, 1970, Joe Boyd, John and Beverley Martin | |
| 1389 | DBA: Methodology chapter | DBA |
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