After a very productive end of year, I had originally planned to do an ambient piece to clear the pipes and embark on a new phase, but that didn’t happen…
Always finish what you start, unless you don’t
An approach I’ve taken to date has been to always finish off songs: if something got recorded (even if it was just a midi sequence), I would finish it. Call it my ADD. Before and over Christmas however, and this was a first for me, I started several pieces but couldn’t really progress them. What to do?
In the end, I simply started a new piece, much more akin to what I’d been working on up to that point, and figured things out pretty quickly. “November Hotel” was another excursion into chord generators, and is essentially a black notes only composition. I was very pleased with the feel of the track – it has a hymn-like quality, and has the twin (and opposing) elements that I think of as characteristic of my writing: a combined, upbeat, melancholy!
I actually finished the writing and tracking before Christmas, but then got distracted by some editing work I needed to do on an old piece that is going on the record I’m making with my singing, lyric writing collaborator. More will follow.
Lesson: clear out as you go, and always keep moving forwards
Given my credo is “work with what music comes out”, I guess I learned that I should trust my credo! I’ve also taken the very uncharacteristic step of deleting the three of four false starts I tried out. If I couldn’t make them work, why let them take up ones and zeroes on my hard drive; I know I’ll never go back to them…
I cried when I wrote this song 