Day 29: Running over

So this is apparently day 29, which means I'm officially over the threshold of my four weeks - shock horror. However, I don't go back to work until Wednesday, so that's my official limit. Today I finished writing Fail, and recorded it. I also re-recorded the vocals for City Song, and finished the lyrics for Sing a Song. I now have to finish writing Pedestriana and Untitled, the latter is a particularly awkward customer. So I have written 19 songs, and, if I include the wordless improv, 20. I've succeeded. In the writing stakes at least.

At the moment I'm reading The Book of Illusions, which is the second novel by Paul Auster that I've read. The first was New York Trilogy, a book which inspired a line in the song You Amaze Me, a line which describes seeing the streets in an A to Z spelling out a name. One of the stories in New York Trilogy (which by the way is a work of total head-bending brilliance) describes a character following directions through New York streets which he eventually realises are spelling out letters. It's all tied in with the story of the tower of Babel, but I forget exactly how. Anyway, that idea came back to me subconsciously when I was writing the bridge to You Amaze Me.

This is actually the second time NYT has been referenced in a song I've written, as in Any Captain Worth His Due I mentioned Babel, which I'd only started to learn about after reading the book (and, coincidentally, seeing a painting of the tower of Babel in a gallery). Of course then the film Babel came out and it was everywhere. I'm going totally tangential here, but I was once party to the viewing of a downloaded version of Babel, a film in which about sixty different languages are spoken. It took a good hour of pretending we knew what was going on before we realised that our download had arrived without the intended English subtitles. Work that irony into a song, Alanis.

Anyway, Paul Auster is slightly inspiring me again in terms of the follow-up part of this project i.e. what I do with it when it's finished. Watch, as they say, this space...

Day 28: Dora and Rudy

In the car on the way back from my step-niece and nephew's naming ceremony I came up with a short little verse for them, which I've set to one of the piano improvisations from Thursday. I've just recorded it, and I hope they like it when they hear it (they're only a few months old so probably won't have strong opinions either way).

Things are now as follows:

Written and recorded:
Brooklyn Bridge
City Song
Codebreaker
Doodlebug
Everyone Likes Coffee Except me
Former Glories
Impulse Control
On Those Dark Days in July
Murder, She Wrote
Realityicide
A Reverie
Dora and Rudy
Shoelaces
The Mismatch Man
The Race
Volcanoes
What's Lost to You

Written but not yet recorded:
Fail

Almost finished:
Sing a song
Pedestriana
Untitled

I may also put the other piano improvisation on there as an instrumental, I think it's nice to have something without words to break things up, don't you?

Day 25: Chipping away

I recorded vocals for City Song, re-did them for July and You Amaze Me, and re-wrote some of the chords for Fail. Played around with my ukulele, started to get some interesting things happening but no actual song as yet. Tomorrow I'm going to do the final piano recording session so otherwise have been getting stuff ready for that. I've also been listening to the Hidden Cameras today, having helped out at a gig of theirs on Saturday for a friend. I hadn't heard their music before but they were really quite special, particularly as the gig was held in Shoreditch Church. I spoke to the vicar afterwards, which felt all kinds of wrong as I had a beer in my hand and had just watched a gay band singing about watersports. He didn't seem to mind.