How To Climb A Mountain

So it's 10:30 at night and I'm very sleepy, and I just remembered that I need to throw together a blog post. I recorded the song this morning, that means I'm done, right??

And now I am sitting at the cluttered kitchen table, the only light coming from my computer screen and the white Christmas lights strung around the ceiling. I am typing to the dulcet tones of Jamie munching on Tuscan white bread spread with my mama's homemade blueberry-maple jam. It's a lovely, comfortable setting, and it occurs to me that at some point I should record a few blog videos from my kitchen, since it's pretty much my favorite room in the house.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how much of a hipster that would make me, a disillusioned 20-something blogging from her kitchen.

ANYWAY. This week's song is about mountains, in a metaphorical sense. Whenever I get anxious over having to do something lengthy and difficult--such as working nine-hour shifts through Sidewalk Sales, or completing all my finals at the end of a semester--my mother puts it into perspective for me by turning it into a mountain. "You're at the bottom of the mountain and the summit is a long way up, and when you look all the way to the top, it can seem like an impossible climb. But if you just focus only on each step at a time, each small task on its own, it'll become a lot easier."

Goddammit. 

So I think about each final paper on it's own, rather than the sum of all the pages I have to write. A shift at work is not eight endless hours stretching on into the evening: it is one hour, then the next, then another. In one more hour, I'll go get some tea. In one more hour, it'll be half-way through the day. In one more hour, I can take my break.

Semesters and jobs aside, I've found that this is a good way to look at a lot of distasteful but necessary things in life. Nonetheless, it's sometimes hard to draw back from the big picture and look at it as anything less than the sum of all the parts, rather than each part individually. While I'm climbing that mountain, it's really difficult not to let my gaze get carried up to the top, mentally measuring the distance between myself and the endpoint.

This was one of those awesome songs that basically wrote itself. As soon as I got the idea--less actual words or music and more of just an image of a mountain in my mind--the was essentially already there, fully formed, melody and all. I love it when that happens, but it sort of make me wonder where the song is coming from, since I feel like I contributed so little to it: it simply sprang from the depths of my mind on its own!

I'm sorry for the video quality this week. I feel like the lighting is sort of off, a little too bright and/or washed out. I think what this basically means is that I shouldn't record in the late morning. Early afternoon or evening is where it's at!

What are you, new? Go to the first post to find out what this blog is all about!

And now for something completely different.

Dear Reader, this week's song is VERY SILLY.

No, seriously. It's probably simultaneously the best and worst song I have ever written. Best, because it's awesome, and worst, because it's profoundly stupid.

It was inspired, as most brilliant things are, by cheese. Specifically, a study carried out by the British Cheese Board about how cheese affects our dreams. (Sweet Dreams Are Made of Cheese, September 2005)

(By the way, how awesome is it that such a thing as the British Cheese Board exists? How do you get on that board, because it sounds like the best job ever. I am so delighted. Is the chairman of the board called the Big Cheese?)

Pictured: British cheese

The study found that peoples' dreams were influenced by the type of cheese they ate before bed. (Read the link, it's impossible to make this stuff up.) I was particularly interested in the dreams people, specifically women, had when eating Stilton:

A massive 85% of females who ate Stilton had some of the most bizarre dreams of the whole study – although none were described as bad experiences. Highlights included talking soft toys, lifts that move sideways, a vegetarian crocodile upset because it could not eat children, dinner party guests being traded for camels, soldiers fighting with each other with kittens instead of guns and a party in a lunatic asylum.

This week's song is not about cheese, however. What inspired this song was the subject matter of one of the dreams described above.

More on that later. This song was also the most "technical" that I've done so far, meaning that it initially took more than just noodling about on my guitar for a few minutes to get the chords just right. The original melody was very sort of jazzy, a very different sort of music than what I'm used to playing, and on my own, I simply could not find any chords that sounded good--at all! It was quite frustrating. I sought help from a friend (who turns out to know way more about music theory than I realized? Thanks, Eric!) who offered some very helpful advice, which I sort of followed. I worked out the notes of the melody on my piano (which I have hitherto used almost exclusively to tune my guitar and expand my dust collection) and then tried to use those notes to find chords that didn't sound awful.

It almost worked. I was able to find some chords that fit the attitude and personality of the song, but it was still overall...messy. I didn’t like it, and felt that by and large, it still didn’t sound the way I wanted it to. There were also a ton of 7 chords (C7, G7, D7) which might actually be okay, but for some reason it felt Wrong to me to have them all in there.

So I completely changed the melody. It’s simpler and more repetitive, still essentially conveys the same attitude I was going for originally, and was MUCH easier to find chords for. I am actually SO PLEASED with this song, largely due to how goofy it is.

So without further ado, I bring you the story of the vegetarian crocodile!

I just want to register my pride that this video required all of ONE TAKE. It helps that it was just two lines repeated over and over and the words were right in front of me.

I also like the idea of a war being fought with kittens. I think there would probably be too much cooing and squealing going on to get any actual fighting done.

No idea what next week's song is going to be able. Y'ALL WILL JUST HAVE TO WAIT AND SEE.

What are you, new? Go to the first post to find out what this blog is all about!

In which an apology is offered.

Whelp, sorry about that. I guess seven weeks was a good run for not missing a single Thursday, yeah? I tried recording this week's song after work yesterday but my microphone was acting wonky so I kept having to re-do takes and then I was tired and hungry and just decided to leave it.

Look at me! I'm so ashamed!

I'm in a lot better mood today, and have managed to put together what I believe to be an acceptable take. This is kind of annoying because while I'm pleased with the song, I don't really like how I sound singing it.

But I tried to capture how I feel about summer, and how beautiful and short it is, and how I try to make the most of the season as possible. (And sometimes my arms get all scratched up from picking blackberries, and I look like I've been wrestling with a pallas cat or something...)

I have a few ideas for next week: either a song I've been wanting to write for a while, or one that I just got inspiration for today. I'm sure they'll both turn up eventually, it's just a matter of which comes first. I suppose it depends on which one I get the most inspiration from.

I keep meaning to write a post on inspiration. I keep meaning to write posts on a lot of things. Maybe I'll actually get around to doing that, one of these days.

An inspiration to us all.

What are you, new? Go to the first post to find out what this blog is all about!

SHINY TOYS: In Which a New Friend is Introduced

DUDES DUDES LOOK WHAT I GOT.

You've achieved +5 Hipster Cred! Level Up!

On Sunday I went and got this RAD BANJO off of Craigslist and now I know like three chords but I can't really remember them, I'd have to look them up in my book. G is easy, that's just an open strum. *hop*

I was going to name it Django because while yes, I know that's totally inappropriate for this particular breed of stringed instrument, Django both sort of rhymes with "banjo" and is vaguely onomatopoeic.* But Mother Dearest vetoed this emphatically ("Django is NOT a banjo name. No, no, no. Do not sully the name of the Almighty Django by affixing it to a banjo!") and suggested Suzannah, which I actually rather like, so I'll probably stick with that. Suzanna the banjo! (I like how you can see my guitar peeking out from under my thumbs-up in the picture. Don't worry, Persephone, you're still my one and only!)

ANYWAY the banjo may or may not make an appearance at some point in a few months once I've figured out how the hell it works. I shall have to dress up in a snazzy suit, in the event. 

LADIES.

ANYWAY on to this week's song. Because I am still working millions of hours, I bring you: 2010 SONG OF THE YEAR. That is, the one and only good song I wrote in 2010. (In fact, it might be the ONLY song I wrote in 2010. Remember what I said back in the beginning about my paltry output?) It is a song about love, and death, and war, and it would have taken only one shot to record, but then my microphone started pooping all over the place and I had to do a couple re-takes to get it right.

I've found that I really miss writing songs and working them out every week, so I'm really hoping that my work schedule will calm down and I'll be able to get back to that next week. I already have some ideas for a new song which I should really write down, which I think I might be able to turn into something that I'm not ashamed of.

Had an interesting surprise the other day: I was flipping through an old three-ring binder of sheet music from various choral ventures of my past, and in the very back I found a bunch of songs and poetry I'd written between approximately the ages of 12 and 15. Heaven help me, I had no idea that stuff was still around and capable of seeing the light of day.  I may have to post some of it here, to embarrass myself and to prove to you all that my songwriting skill really has improved over the past ten years!

By the by, friends, I found this really cool graphic of the Ira Glass quote that helped inspire this blog. I think it might be a poster in which case I would love to have it for my wall, but I can't figure out where to find it.

What are you, new? Go to the first post to find out what this blog is all about!

*That's the first time I've spelled "onomotapoeic" correctly on the first try! Be proud of me! Writing this footnote was the second time!

True Musicianship, and Coming Down from the Tower

Throughout the writing of this blog, I have established that I am a Real Musician because:

*It sometimes takes me hours to record a single song.
*I am frequently dissatisfied with my work.
*My day job gets in the way of my music-making.

That last one is especially pertinent this week, since working 40 hours means that I'm too tired and don't really have the time or mental capacity to write a whole new song. So I dug out an old song I wrote back in high school to share with you all! It tells the story of a popular fairy tale--I'm sure you'll be able to figure out which one!

I was thinking that it would be interesting to compare this song to the ones I've written recently and see how my songwriting has developed over the years, but I realized--from the sound and feel of this song, my songwriting hasn't changed all that much! Which is a bit discouraging, since one would hope that my skills would have evolved somewhat since I was sixteen or seventeen years old. But, to be fair, this is one of the better songs I wrote back then, and I haven't written all that much since. Now that I'm trying to write a song a week, I hope to see more of an evolution occur...eventually.

It's interesting to think how, back in, say, middle school, when I was in fifth or sixth grade, I wrote so many songs. I had a big three-ring binder filled with several dozen songs I had written; I was constantly coming up with new songs! Most of them weren't very good by today's standards, of course, and I didn't play guitar back then so I didn't have that aspect to dwell upon, but sometime I wonder: where did that go? How did I lose the ability to be so prolific? To revisit the Ira Glass quote that inspired this blog, I think what probably happened was that as I grew older, I raised my standards and acquired better taste. My songs didn't seem so good anymore, and I started to become more critical of my output and of what ideas I would allow to survive.

In the course of a recent entry in Amanda Palmer's blog (discussing a songwriting clinic she did for the summer program at Berklee) she mentioned a Leonard Cohen quote that she keeps taped up next to her piano:

"I have to finish it in order to know whether it deserves to survive."

I think this is excellent advice that I need to employ in my own songwriting. I shouldn't simply condemn songs the moment I encounter a snag in their writing. I should plow through and see it to its completion before I decide whether or not it's actually crap.

ANYWAY. I know what you're all really here for.

The title of this blog post includes the phrase "coming down from the tower" both because it pertains to the song (see what I did there!) and also because the theme of emergence is central to this blog and this project. I have been locking myself up in a metaphorical tower, both musically (my personal standards being so high that it's difficult to actually complete a song) and in terms of audience, hardly allowing anyone else but myself to hear the music I'm creating. So now, like Rapunzel, I am descending from the tower and out into the big wide world, letting everyone see not only my creative output, but my creative process as well! Gee whiz!

You helped me let my hair down, now I know what love can be!

Next week will be another older song, thought not as old as this week. (Will probably be 2010 Song of the Year, i.e. the one decent song I wrote in 2010.) Time to add another bullet to the list of reasons why I'm a Real Musician: I miss writing songs!

What are you, new? Go to the first entry to find out what this blog is all about!

Because dancing around a bonfire of shoes, that's why.

I recently wrote out a list of things I want to do with my life (i.e. things I would rather be doing than working my slimy retail job), and one of the items was "dance around a bonfire of disgustingly over-priced shoes while ululating." What a splendid idea!

These shoes cost $300.
These shoes cost $300.
These shoes cost $300.
LET'S BURN THEM.

My unhappiness in my job is growing steadily with every passing day. It's not a bad job, all in all--good pay, not too busy, intelligent boss, nice coworkers. It's the environment and mentality of the store that makes my skin crawl: trying to get people to spend as much money as possible on fancy shoes. I just want to create beautiful things and make people happy; trying to increase my average sale doesn't factor into that, in my universe.

The song I wrote for this week reflects all of that. It is a song that my boss must never hear! I just don't think that would go over well. In this song, I combine my frustration with my job with ideas of what I'd rather be doing.

Musically, it's pretty simple, the guitar especially, since it's just four chords repeated over and over, but I really like the way it sounds. I'm quite pleased with how the song turned out, in fact! The only thing I'm unsure about is that there are two "you"s to whom the narrator sings: one "you" is antagonistic and "one" is friendly. There's no explicit distinction between them, but I hope it should be clear that it's two different entities being sung at, rather than the same one, as that wouldn't make sense.

I should note that I've been battling a nasty cold all week and lost my voice for about four days. Every day and in every way I am getting better and better, but my voice isn't still in tip-top shape. So that's why I sound a little strained and brittle this week.

Next week is my first 40-hour work week, and as I discussed last week, I'm not going to try and write a song on top of that, so I'll be posting a previously-written piece. I recently "rediscovered" a song that I wrote back in high school that I really like, so I'll probably do that one.

I also have been meaning to write a blog post about musical complexity/simplicity/complexity-hidden-in-simplicity, so hopefully that will turn up at some point in the next week or so.

For the rest of my life, this is how I will react when confronted with a
pair of fancy, expensive shoes.

What are you, new? Go to the first post to find out what this blog is all about!

I'm not quitting my day job, but that doesn't mean I can't gripe about it.

Friends, my friends! I have come up with something EXTREMELY CLEVER.

Heretofore, I have been penning songs in my notebook on the front and back of a single sheet of paper. Over the past few weeks, as I've been having to learn my songs much more quickly than previously (wheee deadlines) this has proven to be inconvenient and unwieldy, as it necessitates pausing in the middle of a song to turn the page. I can't do that while I'm recording!

Boo, hiss.

So then I struck upon the very clever idea of writing the lyrics on two facing sheets of paper! That way the book can lie open in front of me and I don't have to turn any messy pages! Gee whiz, what a fantastic invention! 

"I'm not wearing any pants!"

Ahem, anyway. That song you see there in the second picture is the one I am singing for you this week! This is a song that I know for a fact, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is unfinished. The melody is fine, the words are fine, but they're not exactly as I want them. Especially the last verse--I think I get the message across, but it doesn't quite convey what I want it to. (Also I want to make it more about the foxes.) So I will continue working on it and hopefully post a revised version later this summer. (Possibly at the end of July--more on that later.)

The aforementioned clever trick with my notebook is why I'm looking down for the entire song. I should figure out a way to prop it up.

This week more than any other I felt that my job was hampering my ability to churn out a song. "Darnit, if I didn't have to do to work today, I'd have time to come up with a new melody and bash out chords for it!" That's right: my day job is getting in the way of my creative output. I guess this is further evidence that I am a Real Musician At Last.

I can't even work on songs in my head while I'm at work because the music my boss insists on playing is so godawful. =(

And now, about the end of July: the third and fourth weeks of July I am working 40 and 38 hours, respectively, and I seriously doubt that I'll be able to come up with entire new songs those weeks. So my plan is to write a song I've already written one week, and then a cover of someone else's song another week. (Probably something by Amanda Palmer or Josh Ritter. I'll try not to play "Wagon Wheel," but hey, it might happen!) Perhaps I'll even manage to bash out a revised version of this week's song.

Then I'll extend this whole project another two weeks so that I can end up with the requisite twelve new songs by the end of it. Sound good? (It had better; this ain't a democracy, here!)

I currently have no idea what next week's song will be like. Hooray!

What are you, new? Go to the first post to find out what this blog is all about!