Mister Loaf to you

Until this week, I'd never really paid much attention to Meat Loaf (i.e. the singer, not the poor excuse for a dinner that feeds the multitude). I picked up Bat Out Of Hell, and I have to say, it's fucking hilarious, but in the best possible way. The songwriting, of course, rips off Springsteen completely (compare the title track with Springsteen's Thunder Road and laugh yourself through the entire nine minutes). Heck, he's even got Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg from the E Street Band playing piano and drums, respectively. But, all credit to Jim Steinman, he's really made Thunder Road work for him: he's got an entire, awesome, album out of one song. Of course, at the end of the day, Springsteen's sprawled genius, displayed over dozens of albums over the last 3 decades, shines much more than Meat Loaf's/Steinman's artistry. But credit where credit is due: Bat Out Of Hell is amazing in the same way that The Beatles albums were amazing. The influences are worn earnestly on the sleeve, and they've stolen very successfully: they've made it their own. And today, a band like The Killers has clearly benefited from this blatant swipe: their grandiose musical and lyrical language is straight out of the same Hell that the Bat came from. (Of course, they want to be played on radio, so the songs are about a third the length of Meat Loaf's, but that's just pragmatism.)

A lot of music fans (read: snobs) hate Meat Loaf. I don't really understand why - most of them love Queen, and both acts obviously share this melodramatic, and very melodic, sensibility (not to mention the MASSIVE voices). Maybe it's because Meat Loaf steals more blatantly than Queen? But then so did Dylan, The Beatles, Springsteen (in the first place!), et al. Everyone steals. Meat Loaf made squillions of dollars from his theft - maybe this is the reason for the dismissal? But so did all of the above people. I think Meat Loaf's been made into a scapegoat for the more 'pure' artistes to scorn.

Fuck 'em. Seriously.

Chinese Demo Crazy

Well the writing's started. Slowly, and a little frustratingly, but there are signs of progress. After a long break from being in any kind of routine, it's a bit hard to remember how certain things are done. Well, maybe not how they're done so much as the headspace required for them to be done well. And then how to access that headspace on demand. It's easy to throw a few chords together, sing a passable melody on top and improvise a few random words, but if it's not painful in any way, it's probably not coming from the right place. Or you don't trust it, or something. I have been having good success with a new technique though - writing the music/melody first, and then mumbling what could be Chinese, or Latin, but is probably just random syllables, into the microphone without having written any words. Listening back to these syllables, words often suggest themselves quite organically and, undeservingly, poetically. It's quite a subconscious thing - you can't really let you're thinking brain get in the way of it. It's been good for a couple of songs, anyway.

I've learned that it's both a blessing and a curse to be writing post album #1. A blessing because you're free to write whatever you want, and a curse because now you have to start thinking pretty clearly about what you want to do, what you want to change and where you want to steer things. Deciding how diverse you allow yourself be is also important: will a disco-lite song work on the same album as an dirgey guitar song? And should the combined lyrical content amount to anything in particular? Most albums aren't 'conceptual' in any way, or at least aren't written with that intention. But then, most groups allow themselves a much smaller piece of musical terf than our band, and so the songwriting and instrumentation - if nothing else - goes a long way to making it all sound like a cohesive record. If you have a very sprawled array of songs - nodding and winking to all sorts of genres and styles - there has to be something over and above the mere genre of every song that unifies things a bit. Or you could do what the Beatles did and put out something that sounds and feels like the White Album and let people just deal with it. But if they'd released that album earlier on, it wouldn't have worked as well as it did - you need to present the 'product' a few times before people allow you to start deconstructing it. Or maybe I'm just conservative.

I've been listening to all the old Split Enz albums recently. I don't think they worried too much about what kind of album they wanted to make before they made it. It sounds like they just recorded all their songs of the moment, and made sense of it after it was all done. I guess there's something in that method too. But then, most of those albums have 80% genius songs and 20% flawed ones that should've been b-sides. Which I guess was the case with most artists when you had to release at least an album every year...

Anyway, better go rehearse.

Well, uni is officially over for the semester. I had my last exam today (Eastern Religion) which went fairly well (I hope). I should be getting very drunk tonight, but instead find myself preparing to rehearse with a new band I've just joined called The Heavy Cases. Quinn, the singer and piano player, writes amazing songs and I'm looking forward to playing in a band that I don't have a huge amount of obligation to. That sounds like I may quit next week. I don't mean that. It's just that I can turn up to rehearsal and enjoy playing the music: the very thing you seek to do when you join a band. After a while, bands can become 'businesses' (if the egos within it are sufficiently ambitious and self-adulating, like the other band I'm in) and most meets don't really involve anything resembling music and creativity. And if a meeting does involve playing music (a rehearsal or gig), the music part consists of songs that you're pretty much sick of and have played a million times over.

Anyway, this isn't the time for feeling glum about it all. It's the start of the summer holidays, I've got a fun new band to jam with, my other band has some pretty exciting stuff coming up, and I now have some time to sit and write new music. Things are officially good. Besides, I can get drunk tomorrow night, the night after, the night after that...

Another brick...

Some people thrive on being busy. I don't. I think it's highly irritating. Particularly when you actually care, deep down, about what you're doing but can't spare the time to do anything properly. This week I'm cramming for an exam, hurrying through an essay, and speeding off to work...and it all seems so ridiculous. When you rush stuff, you're ridding it of any kind of deeper value it may contain. There was no eternal significance in anything I did today. Which is a shame, because I really do think the essay and exam are important and potentially very interesting, but I don't have time to make them substantial for myself. This is what happens when education is costly and study support is next to nil: lots of students madly rushing to learn what they need to in between shifts, and then forgetting everything the day after the exam because nothing's had a chance to work its way particularly deep into the memory circuits. Needless to say I'll be glad when things calm down a bit and I can start doing things properly again.

Silly Bulls

The tour was good. We got back late last night, and I'm truly knackered and aching (5 days of pretty much constant car travel). I'm meant to immediately start thinking about my last uni essay for the year, which is due on Friday. I'm finding that more difficult than I imagined (and I did imagine it would be difficult). Now I find that not only does my body hurt, but my mind has slowed down considerably. Maybe it's a testament to the sophistication of the chatter in the tour mobile, but words more than two syllables are leaving me dumbfounded.

Looking forward to uni being over and starting to write songs again. It's been a fair while since I've had the time and the drive to do it (usually these things don't coincide). But writing is something I don't really stop thinking about, even if I'm not doing it. If you're a writer of songs, you're always evaluating other people's songs as a writer, which makes listening to music both fun and educational (and no I'm not getting paid to say this). Over the last few months I've built up quite a mental collection of 'things to try' when I write the next batch of songs. Some of them are musical - types of chord changes or melodies, and others are lyrical, although I find the lyrical ideas are always a lot vaguer than the musical ones. I'm not the kind of writer who always carries around a notebook to scrawl any 'inspiration' down. Having tried this a little in the past, I find this method too piecemeal - it's rare that a song presents itself fully formed, and to try and construct a song with a dozen or more fragments of lyrical material isn't what I call fun. I like to keep things a bit more spontaneous and organic - I think you can always tell if a song's written in one consistent 'mood setting' or if it's been tampered with when another mood strikes, thus ruining the purity of the mood. I probably sound anal...But it is exciting to have a clean slate in front of me, and to design record # 2 from the ground up.

Good idea, Huw

Huw, the guitarist in the band I'm in, started a blog a month or two ago. I'd been thinking of starting one for a while, and I guess this gave me the extra shove I needed to get one going (I'm not allowed to leave comments on his one until I sign up for one of my own, apparantly...). Blogs are quite strange though - I've always thought so, and continue to do so. It's like a diary, but for anyone to read. It's like a soapbox, but for people who aren't important enough to have a real one. Sure, it may be one of the ways the internet's making everyone feel more connected to the world and to their fellow humans, but it still smells fishy. I imagine my blog will primarily be a way for me to organise my brain, and to get rid of crap that insists on polluting it. That's the excuse I'm using anyway. I could write in a diary, sure, but then nobody would have the chance to tell me that my brain needs fixing from time to time (which is absolutely the case). So if you care to read any entries, please feel free to refute and/or generally go ballistic on any of these thoughts.

My band's called Plastic Palace Alice, and we're going on tour tomorrow with a Sydney band called Cuthbert and the Nightwalkers and a Brisbane band called The Rocketsmiths. Fun will be had no doubt, but there's a hell of a drive on Sunday back from Yamba (a few hours south of Brisbane) to Melbourne. Touring - at our 'indie' level - is certainly not the romantic thing it's made out to be by pop culture. Spending days on end in the same stinky car with 5 other stinky people (yes ladies, you can smell too) ain't the plan for the rest of my life. I might have to get used to it though, as it doesn't look like this reality will change anytime soon. We've just released a single and organised the release of our first album for March next year. Between now and then, we'll be touring quite a bit and planning all kinds of future conquests. One day we might even make some of our money back. I don't expect to make a profit, however, until at least the second album (working title: "The Great Recession").