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...