Day 23: Perspiration/inspiration

More of the former than the latter today. I'm getting some of the written but not recorded stuff into shape and have been playing around with chord progressions for some of the unfinished songs. I think I may have to abandon the Pigeon song, which is a shame as I like some of the lines in it, it's supposed to be about a pigeon singing from the afterlife:

I was a pigeon
By a prior breath
And I met my death
In this
Metropolis

Oh, I was a fine bird
A Bonaparte
Of both park and heart
I sparred
As well as I sparked

But train stations are dangerous places for pigeons

I fell foul
Fell down
Onto the tracks
And in the black
Of the soot
I lost my foot
As the train came in
Then it crushed my wing
Precious thing!
And somebody said
"How disgusting, it's dead!"
And at last I lost my head...

Despite having done quite a lot of stuff that usually triggers ideas over the weekend I'm not feeling particularly inspired, but that's okay as there's plenty to get on with that doesn't require a particularly fertile mind.

Day 18: Murder, she wrote

Inspiration can come from surprising places. Today I was watching Murder She Wrote again (for it is becoming a regular lunchtime appointment) whilst strumming my guitar, and ended up writing the following song:

It's so far removed
From the horror of homicide
Characters mostly unmoved
Taking murder in their stride
Murder
Murder
Murder, she wrote

A collection of cosy crimes
A cultural artefact
Resolutely of our time
A shared memory, a common fact
Murder
Murder
Murder, she wrote

It's sad but really no one would want to know
Jessica Fletcher, death follows her wherever she goes

I am majorly amused by the fact that I've written a song about this TV series. It may seem that my writing is becoming more whimsical as I go along, but this lyric actually fits very well into the themes established in other songs.

I'm also experimenting today with some electronic stuff that may not have any singing - does this qualify as a proper song I wonder?

Day 17: Already??

Just had a slight panic at the fact I'm now on day 17... But whatever. Today I recorded vocals for You Amaze Me. Now, the first line of this song is "If my life were a song/you'd be the bridge/bold and breathtaking and explorative", so I had sort of set myself up there - the song was going to have to have a pretty good bridge. I hadn't actually written it, when I recorded the piano part I recorded quite a few alternatives from which I thought I'd be able to make something good. Luckily today as I experimented with melodies over the top of the piano part I came up with something which in my opinion is a pretty killer bridge. And even better, it mentions Scrabble, which is my favourite board game. I think this may be the only ballad with the word Scrabble in it.

I also re-recorded vocals for The Race with the new preamp... Looking back I don't think I ever mentioned The Race - there are a few songs that happen in bits and I forget to refer to them in this blog. The Race I pretty much had figured out before I started and recorded in the first few days, it has some lyrics that I like:

I saw you out crawling to the crashing sea
I was out walking with the elderly
You were running out of money, running out of time
Driving yourself to the end of the line
Well the candle in your heart wasn't strong enough
Your torch bulb blew, the weather was rough
Then the lighthouse did it - lit your destiny
But it only showed you where you didn't want to be

The music here is building and building, so the imagery does the same - in the first part it's:
Crawling - Walking - Running - Driving
Then in the second:
Candle - Torch - Lighthouse

So there.

Oh, and the song I started to write yesterday will I think be called Everyone Likes Coffee Except Me.

Day 11: Back to unreality

I am a total fool to even be writing this - the back pain has returned with a vengeance and using a laptop is the last thing I need. All I've been able to do today is lie on the floor with a book under my head and watch daytime TV. I was in the middle of trying to read a deeper subtext to Murder She Wrote when I realised that Nausicaa Valley of the Wind was on Film Four. I love Miyazaki's films, so this made the inactivity bearable. I did drift off in the middle though...

I've written lyrics for the 80s song:

As the protagonist
Drives
Over the Brooklyn Bridge
Imagined lives
That make sense
That are safe
We are kids
We believe all we're not told
Is impossible

Short and sweet. I've realised that there is a bit of a thread running through what I'm writing after all - unreality. I have others on the go now also, I'd love to play the piano or guitar but it's causing me too much difficulty. Tomorrow I hope I'll be back (haha) to normal.

Day 6: The end of the line

I had written a long entry about a man who jumped or fell or was pushed under a train today, but on reflection I decided that this was probably inappropriate. Death appears quite a lot in my songs. In the past I worried about this - why so morbid? I would think to myself. Now however I just accept that mortality is something I find endlessly fascinating. I think it's odder not to be fascinated by it really.

Anyway, I had to go to High Barnet to buy microphones (Rode NT5s - I will run through all the equipment I use some point). The Northern line was down on the way there (see above) so I was forced to construct a painfully ramshackle journey from a Meccano set of infrequent, meandering bus routes. The return leg however saw the underground resurrected, and I was able to travel from High Barnet, which is a station I really like. On the way back to Angel I started to write in a pad that I discovered had been sneakily written in by a prior Owen. He wrote:

What a privileged pair of eyes have I
In thrall to tall buildings and sky

What beauteous breath this city brings
To lift my soul up on its wings

What brutal teacher is this town
To lift me up and beat me down

What lessons does its temper teach?
Should I give up?
Or never cease?

I didn't write this in the four weeks, but with some work I might still use some or all of it...

Day 2: Nature abhors a vacuuming neighbour

I awoke at around 6 a.m. this morning, too hot and thirsty. Throwing off a mummy-like cocoon of covers rectified the first problem, but I couldn't bring myself to go and get a glass of water so the thirst remained. I have often found that waking before my mind is ready, or staying up all night, is conducive to having new and odd and good ideas (in fact it was being woken at 5 a.m. that gave me the idea to start doing this in the first place). So it was this morning, when I had two songs reeling around my head. I blearily managed to complete lyrics to a song called Volcanoes, and write a sizeable chunk of another song that I don't have a title for yet. Volcanoes I recorded guitar and voice for today (in spite of the best efforts of upstairs neighbours to thwart me with exhaustive vacuuming). The lyrics to the song are as follows:

Your self-centred chatter
Bored me to the core
Too scared to say so
I sat for hours more
Thinking of the sea
Tides turning internally
Imagining beauty
Unreality

Our heads are like planets
Red-hot under skulls
Speaking like volcanoes
Makes life wonderful

You remain remote
Our flow is disrupted
Still inside I hope
Uninterrupted

The Art Loving People song is worrying me a little, I don't think I like it. I'm going to go to bed thinking about it and see if anything comes by the morning.