I’ve been pretty productive songwriting and recording wise, but not so much as regards this blog, so I’ll catch up now and cover the last two tracks I’ve posted.
Sierra Tango
As you’ll have noticed, I’m still on a piano jag, and this is another piece that came about with me at the keyboard, and writing what are effectively fingering exercises. I liked the melancholy feel, and the lovely tone of the sampled piano.
I don’t write lyrics or sing, but I had the idea that I could do something lyrical (and almost melodic/vocal) without singing, i.e. by incorporating an “encoded” musical element. I’d heard some snatches of Morse code recently, and so decided to see if that would work. Of course I still needed source text.
I found what I was looking for while looking at the website of my favourite artist, Tom Phillips, specifically a sculpture called “After Henry James”, which contains an edited quote from James’ short story “The Middle Years”. As I don’t know Morse, I found a site that encodes text and turns it into MIDI, and, Bob’s your auntie’s live in lover…
This fitted in very nicely when I’d pitched it in the right key. Of course Morse doesn’t syncopate, which caused a few unmusical stutters, so I decided to get out my artistic licence and quantise the dits and dars, which worked wonderfully. The letters stayed coherent, but I’d need a Morse expert to say if the sense was maintained.
For the “chorus” I used the the text that Tom left out: “[o]ur doubt is our passion and our passion is our task”. Obviously I couldn’t have written better!
Mike Romeo
Similarly pianistic, but much less intellectually driven, this song came out of an idea to write a driving beat that was given texture by way of a slap back echo. That’s how it started, though, as it progressed I kept that beat and binned the texture. Such is life.
The end result is a delightful (to my mind) piece of uplifting “handbag house”. I continue to tap my toes.
I cried when I wrote this song 