It’s been a while since I posted, and that’s one of the topics of this update: things that stop us from writing songs…
I’ve always been a very prolific writer. I’d often bring three or four songs to rehearsal in a week, but I noticed something: if my lyrical partner was getting bogged down with the backlog, the tap would turn off until they started to catch up. Totally unconscious, and quite weird!
Now, as I’m not actually in a band, and I’m just writing music, what could be stopping me? I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I’m working on a project with an old friend, and while this has been in the background for around six years, often dormant for twelve months or more at a time, in the last six months we’ve actually got to the point where a couple of tracks are kind of, sort of, just visible over the horizon. These are all old tracks I wrote years ago, in fact they all predate the start of the project, but of late I’ve done a fair bit of work editing, remixing, bouncing tracks and stems to fit around my partner’s versions of the songs, and this has been messing with my head a little. Some kind of muscle memory I suppose!
Golf Whisky
So what’s this new track about? Despite the reappearance of our old friends the guitar and bass, the inspiration was some nice electric piano phrases I came up with. In the background I was playing a few different albums – “Chaos and Creation in the Backyard” by Paul McCartney, and Beck’s “Sea Change” – both records I especially love for the orchestration of David Campbell (Beck’s dad). I wanted to push my scoring envelope, so I set out to add some strings in something like his style. Of course the results don’t bear too much comparison, but I think the string arrangement is probably the best I’ve done to date.
The guitar and bass came late in the day (bass was done today in fact!), but now I’m really looking forward to more righteous shredding…
I cried when I wrote this song 