Since I've been absorbed by writing projects lately, I haven't had much time to play music, but I have been working on a few projects in the background.
The little bit of time I have had to play has produced three new song ideas that are the best I've had in a while. One is almost complete and is called "Saddle Up (Make or Break)" and is just waiting for 4 lines to be written in the bridge to get placed in the done column.
So, on my lunch break today I played about 5 minutes of a melody that started with me singing fun lines to the kids while they played outside this weekend. The lines always ended, "So I left my kids at the supermarket." You know:
- I didn't know, they'd cost so darned much, so I left my kids at the supermarket
- I didn't think, it would cause a big scene, so I left my kids at the supermarket
- They started acting like kids often do, so I left my kids at the supermarket
- I had a chance to join the circus so I left my kids at the supermarket
Anything to get a laugh from the kids. But I loved the melody. So I had 5 minutes at lunch today and picked up the Martin, strummed a bit. Fresh in my mind was a line I'd jotted into Evernote a while back "Living echoes of a life I never led." Eventually it worked itself into a full verse, though my 5 minutes were up and I had to zip back to work. The second verse kind of wrote itself as I was trying to rush to get the first into the Evernote database. And here's why: The Avett Brothers.
I've been studying their song structures a lot lady, and am really intrigued by the similarity between the words of different verses and how those verses can have widely different meanings - just by changing a word or two. The cool thing about this approach is that the similarity of the wording helps to reinforce the melody so that by the end of the 4 minute song you feel like you've not only heard it before but could sing along with the whole song (you will probably get some words wrong, but you'll feel like you *know* the song).
So with both these songs I looked at ways I could make minor changes to the words, change or deepen the meaning and reuse them as subsequent verses. I'm very happy with this approach and it actually gives me a nice box to work inside when I am trying to add verses. It does appear the bridge will be the difficult part of the song when using this approach, but I think the end result will be a more divergent bridge that makes the rest of the song more "homey" when you return to it.
I'd like to share "Saddle Up" once it's in a more complete state. The words don't do it justice and I really want to complete it before I put it out there. For the sake of demonstration, though, I will share the lyrics I have so far for the new song I just started today. Notice how the wording of the first two stanzas are mimicked in the second two. It will be interesting to see where it goes, but as of the song being 5 minutes old it looked something like:
I wish I could say at the end of it all
That I gave all I had to give
But I'm living echoes of a life I never
Took the time or pride to live
It's all my fault
But that don't heal bruises
It only solves
Who wins and who loses
I wish I could say after the fall
That I'm prepared for the winter cold
But as the spring closes I'm left to myself
Still drunk from the days of my summer, my gold
Find in the faults
A wealth of excuses
It doesn't change
Who wins or who loses
The first and third stanzas are definitely more different, and I think because of this the meaning of the fourth stanza has a lot more depth than the meaning of the second stanza, even though half the words are the same. Not sure if the concept comes across without the melody, but I hope you get the gist of it.
Besides these projects, I've got a track list finalized for the album, and a title. "Linens and Things: The Potentially Brilliant Wreckage of an Exceptionally Ordinary Gentleman." I just have to get my iLok replaced so I can get back into ProTools and see if I can pretend to know what I'm doing on that side of things. Hopefully recording will resume early next year.
Thank you for your eyeballs!
- DJ
(NaNoWriMo Word Count = 11587...only about 6K off target...probably ought to quit writing songs and blogs and such).
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