Current Project

TUNES

Current Project

This project description ended up a bit longer than expected, but it's essentially the ideas floating around what I'm working on.

I've been working on some material the past 3-4 years that has moved in an acoustic direction. Not that it's all singer/songwriter type stuff- most of it is written in the spirit of stripping down the music to its barest form so that it is not clouded by huge arrangements, overproduction, and unnecessary instrumentation, with the hope that the music itself (the chord progressions, the melodies) is enough to captivate the listener.
Whether the tunes come across successfully in that manner has yet to be seen.
Of course, with having only an extremely humble home recording environment at my disposal and no recording contract promising fully funded ventures into whatever aural territories my speckled heart desires, the very nature of these pieces comes about by necessity.
But of course that's from what they say invention is sired.
Following the suit of this sort of scope, the bareness and simplicity of the pieces' instrumentation tends to lend to a shorter overall duration. So, many of these pieces are less than 3 minutes with only a few different sections.
Alas, it does begin to sound like a singer/songwriter thing. But I've been trying to include things like various time signatures (no, it's not acoustic math rock) and chord and note choices I feel are less ordinary. Many were supposed to be instrumentals, but I've found that vocals have been coming easier and easier to me (having not done much singing in the past, this was a surprise).
The vocals, however, necessitated something I had absolutely NEVER done: write lyrics.
In my former band, all the lyrics were written by the vocalist so I was left to just write music- which was totally fine with me. So, I've had to find a style of writing for myself. However, being an instrumental musician at heart, I never really paid attention to lyrics before and found this rather painful. I soon found that actually trying to sit and write yielded nothing remotely interesting. In fleshing out songs, I would make tapes and take them in the car to see where the pieces should go, and would often sing/hum along to try and figure out melody lines. Eventually, words would stick- usually just ones that I felt phonetically fit with the music, or came to mind and wouldn't leave. Certain phrases would always come in my head, so I decided to incorporate them in lyrics.
Ultimately, on one song I actually just tried recording a live improvisational vocal track that was largely Cocteau Twins-ish garbled junk, just to get the vocal melodies I had on tape. Upon listening back to the track over and over again, I began to take what the gook sounded like and transform it into words that sounded like the gook and project a meaning from there. Once I had a sort of focus derived from the gook, it made it easier to finish the lyrics. The style that eventually emerged from this process was a sort of vague, figurative one from which specific meanings could not necessarily be drawn- which I now know is what I like in lyrics.
So the lyric development was/is a real learning process.