CotD! Below, but first…
The countdown is on:
5/30: ICHQ Pop-up Shop in the Asheville Mall softly opens
5/31: Candy Macabre official release—vinyl preorders start shipping, album appears on the streamers
Another installment in the write/record process series
I started this series over here.
On the subject of making up songs, I was saying how I’ll write a couple of lines and then, I’ll find some more that “go with” the first few. The “go with” can be a matter of the lines scanning similarly or having the right syllable counts. I had a professor in college, who I also TA’d for in grad school, who was very good at teaching prosody when most of my other poetry courses weren’t focused at all on mechanics. I’m still really motivated and engaged when things scan nicely.
Alternatively, the “go with” can be a content alignment in terms of figurative language or topic—like, ‘oh, both these lines are about ducks!,’ or, ‘oh, both these lines use gambling metaphors.’ Whatever’s clever. Sometimes too, I like a line that is baldly confessional, free of any attempt to dress up the sentiment conveyed. The first line of the first song on Candy Macabre is like that; Colt Cult starts, “I live my whole life balled up too tight.”
Then I just stack ‘em up—the lines. Till I have enough. Less is more. A key, absolutely foundational component of my aesthetic and approach to song-writing is KEEP IT SHORT! There’s a lot to be said about this and the positive and negative motivations that drive me to this principle, but it’s an important one. There are a handful of comments from musician’s that I’ve sort of stitched together into a makeshift text book on rock aesthetics. Some of them are probably at least semi-apocryphal. One of them is that Johnny Ramone saw the Beatles play a half-hour set at Shea Stadium, and he figured if the Beatles play 30 minutes, his band should definitely not play more than 15. Good thinking. I have no idea if this is true. A quick google yields a bunch of stories about Johnny wanting to throw rocks at the Beatles. Who knows?
In any case: Leave ‘em wanting more. Or at least don’t give ‘em a chance to get bored.
Because here’s the thing: Most bands aren’t bad. Some are for sure. But most bands who have gotten it together enough to book a gig—even in a small bar or whatever—are reasonably together. Most of the bands you see aren’t bad; they’re boring. I would say the same thing about most popular music. Even a catchy song turns gratingly metallic when it goes back to the chorus one too many times. See All the Single Ladies. (My one-line review of Beyoncé: I love everything about her other than her music.)
I’m saying the bar band playing down the street and Beyoncé have the same problem: Too much of the same.
So I don’t stack too many lines. How many times do you need to hear my chorus? Probably once is enough. Maybe twice.
By this point in the song-assembly process, I need to pick up the guitar. I’ll sing the lines the way they sound in my head, and I’ll think about/start strumming chords that could go under those words/melody. At this point, there’s usually some give and take. The lines shift to accommodate the emerging chords and rhythms. The music gets rebuilt to serve the lines. Sometimes the melody in my head is gone almost instantly in favor of something that clicks; sometimes I can play just the thing needed to support the nascent melody.
Then one of two things happen:
I stall out. The song gets shelved. I’ve never gone back to a song that stalls out at this stage. I always kind of think I will, but it hasn’t happened yet. I’ve got quite a few piled up.
I record. Bare minimum, I will do a quick take of me singing and playing what I have. This scratch track becomes the stable kernel of the song, and at this point I consider the song “complete.”
Declaring the song complete saves it from stall-out oblivion. Then, if at all possible, I record the song within the next few days. I’ll write more about how that goes in a future post. Preview: It’s quick!
I like to get on a roll with things—the Animal Headed Pin-up Model Series was a chance to do that, and sometimes I get in that sort of groove with songs. I know people do those song a week challenges and things like that, and I might like to do something along those lines after I shut down the Pop-up Shop.
Here’s a preview of the upcoming post on recording:
Finally, the CotD: Feel Like Celebrating
I used this one as the cover for a new song over on Bandcamp: Raccoon Tour.