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I wrote a song at the weekend. It is the first song I’ve written in about six months, and though I suppose at the moment it’s still only an embryo of a fully matured song, it has stuck in my head – which means it passes the first test in the quality control procedure. Not that there’s actually a procedure, but it’s always a good sign when I can remember how to play it and how the melody goes the next day.
I think the most recent one before this weekend’s effort was ‘Relax’, which in truth was cobbled together in about five minutes just before a practise session. The lyrics were written at various intervals while sat at work and then printed out and shoved in my bag for further ‘work’ at home (ie. never looked at again). Then while I was waiting for the rest of the band to join me in the practise room one day I messed about with the first chords that came into my head, retrieved the crumpled up paper from my bag and hey presto – a song. Turns out it’s not a bad song either, which makes me either really lucky, or a bad judge of the quality of my songs.
It’s funny how some of the tunes we play regularly have been written is so many disparate ways. ‘Jennifer’ was written lyrics first, with no real thought for the melody, and then a chord sequence and melody was painstakingly tailored to fit around them. ‘I Wouldn’t Move to London For You’ was almost stream-of-consciousness garbled nonsense, blared out into my computer while earnestly strumming at four chords. It was then tweaked and polished to give it more structure and some sort of sentiment and meaning. ‘Dissever’ has taken about two years to write, starting off as a folky strum, written on my own, fed up with the cold winter, and then developed in the last three or four months with the band into its current multi-movement epic form.
I probably don’t spend as much time as I should writing songs. I certainly don’t spend too much time in one sitting poring over the minute details and planning and plotting and fixing and working a song to death; once I have the basic ingredients (usually a first verse and a chord sequence, and then a change for the chorus) I will leave it alone and almost forget about it. It will be swilling around in my head, or scribbled down in a notebook and then when a new song is needed I’ll take it out and see if I can use some, or all of what I’ve got there. I used to record them all as acoustic demos, but I don’t do that anymore (I was listening through some old demos that I’d done three or four years ago and none of them had ever been used and probably never will see the light of day). When we needed a batch of new songs for the band I dug into my notebooks and stuck together a load of ideas that were kicking around in there, which provided us with ‘My DNA’, ‘Catcher in the R’, and as mentioned before, ‘Relax’ (all of which, by the way are going to be released on our new recordings this summer).
The new song I wrote this weekend will probably sit in my notebook, waiting to be called into action. Perhaps it will emerge whole, or maybe some of the chords will be grafted onto something else, or maybe just the sentiment will remain in my head, to be squeezed out with new words and a new direction on something new entirely.
I’m looking forward to hearing it, whatever it is.
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