I sat down last night and recorded some rough reference demos of a number of songs I’ve been working on. Let me emphasize rough: these are sloppy, lofi first-take attempts to hammer down some initial details. Lyrics aren’t final, verses are missing, chords and notes are flubbed, etc; and none of the crazy elaborate production ideas I have in mind are present.
Still, the ideas are there; you can get an idea of what I’m thinking. So here’s four:
That’s right. Not pop, or soda, or soda pop; not coke, or soft drink, or even carbonated beverage: we’re going future tech on this mother. We’re distilling it. We’re propogating a meme, baby:
CarboBev. Blame metafilter’s jefbla. And drink your CarboBevs.
And, specifically, Sleater-Kinney’s One More Hour is really great. Possibly a perfect song. Man.
Bits and pieces of refinements and additions to existing songs. Nailed down a probable key All the Girls… and firmed up some rhythmic notions for Little Metal Things.
New song, about the propriety of writing sad songs when life is good:
Think it might be a good’n. We’ll see.
No recording yet—I should probably do up some rough demos tomorrow, so as to be sure not to forget some of these initial execution ideas. Plus it’ll prove I’m not just making this all up.
It’s day 3, morning, as I write this, but that’s okay. Rocked my energy reserve needle clear left of the glowing E on the dash. Went to bed.
Started in on a new song on the way to pre-gig rehearsal with The Man So Cool yesterday afternoon:
So far it’s a few lyrics in an atonal cadence, with arrangement/looping/drum ideas behind it. The least song-y song I’ve written in a while. Paranoid dance music.
All these little metal things / buried in the street / all these little metal things / buried in the street / that’s how they getcha-cha-cha-cha-cha
Inspiration in the strangest places.
Need to ideate some more today. I’d love to have the raw materials for the whole album’s worth of songs—say, ten or twelve specific ideas with beginning lyrics, hooks, tone in mind—by week one. Doing that by the end of this weekend is probably hoping for too much, but, hey, it’s the weekend. I’ve already got four song ideas and another strong instrumental idea so far.
So I’m doing this whole write and record an album in a month thing. I’ve spent the last several days trying not to think about music in any detail—trying not to cheat, you see—and today is the day that I can start putting stuff down on paper.
So I’ve got the beginnings of a few songs, ranging from general harmonic idea to verses and chorus. Working titles of three songs that have some bit of lyrics so far:
I could knock out rough demos of those at this point, but I think I’ll sit down this weekend to scratch them out. I’m pretty excited about all three of them, actually; now I just need to, you know, think of like NINE MORE SONGS OUT OF THE BLUE. Nuts. Craziness.
Night!
