Something Wrong With You

I have real difficulty in writing these accompanying vignettes of text. When you think about it, with 99% of all other songs you listen to no such road-map to the songs’ meaning exists. Indeed, one of the things that I love about music is not having the meaning spelled out for me and having to derive a personal response to what the song is about – which will, more often than not, be different for everyone.

But I don’t know. Maybe it’s better to have a bit of background info?

So, with that in mind I’m not going to say too much about his one. Keyword here, however, would be “procrastination”. Anything else is up to you.

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The Ballad Of Robert Scoble

This song should probably be banned under the Trades Descriptions Act as it isn’t, in fact, about Robert Scoble at all. It’s really about me groaning under the weight of too much online information.

For those that don’t know Robert though, I should explain that he writes, reports and opines on technology and the internet and, as he puts it; “drinks from the fire-hose of information”. Although I haven’t looked at the numbers recently, Robert follows somewhere in the region of 30,000 people on Twitter, at one time would read thousands of blog posts a day and has been a strong advocate of social media services such as Friendfeed….and how he keeps up with at all, I just don’t know.

Our online lives afford us the ability to access an incredible amount of information instantly. But with that can come an almost insidious desire to know EVERYTHING that’s going on ALL the time and it’s that that this song is about. I got to the point where I found myself thinking; “I can’t keep up with all this…”, which in turn led to; “…but imagine what it must be like for Scoble!”.

However, I really want to make it clear that this song is not about having a dig at Robert Scoble – there’s too much of that kind of thing going on else where on the net. Although I’ve never actually met him he does seem like a nice enough guy. I don’t always agree with what he says but, all things considered, I would much rather have this version of the internet with Robert Scoble in it than a version of the net without him.

Listen To The Ballad Of Robert Scoble

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Sunshine

The Native Americans, famously, perform ‘rain dances’ to induce the rain to come to dry, arid landscapes. As I looked out of my window to sheets of rain falling from murderous looking clouds I wondered whether a ’sun song’ might have a similar effect!

It’s been a long, weary winter and, if the last couple of days are anything to go by, it looks like it’s finally come to an end.

So, quite simply, this is a simple wee song about those long, sun-kissed days spent in the garden or in the park, where everyone feels and looks good.

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Stephen Fry

I found myself almost supine on the sofa; absent-mindedly cuddling an acoustic guitar while staring at my de-focused life in the de-focused middle-distance. Perhaps I inadvertently caught sight of some his books on the bookcases, but I can’t say for sure. Maybe QI, or one of his documentaries was on TV the night before and was still rattling around my sub-conscious. I really can’t say. Or, indeed, a line from a sketch in the formative ‘A Bit Of Fry & Laurie’; “I think he just said vulva!” (if you don’t know that – seriously, you don’t know what you are missing!). But who knows.

Anyway, my fingers found a two chord sequence and I heard myself sing “Although I can never be I can try….Just to be more like Stephen Fry”. This pulled me up and out of my self-pitying stupor – if nothing else there was potential for comedy here – black comedy, sure, but comedy none the less.

I stumbled around for a few moments to find the next few words: “…I’m lacking the vocabulary; I need a bigger dictionary” and the rest came very, very quickly.

So I present to you; “Stephen Fry” a song about coming up short when measured against the achievements of our heroes – the perfect accompaniment for when we are feeling just a little thick!

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Lazy Bones

Laziness. Indolence. Inertia. Subjects I could talk for hours on – if, indeed, I could be bothered!

Actually, I don’t think I’m that lazy but there are times when I enjoy nothing more than doing absolutely nothing; letting the world go by or examining the inside of my eyelids. Lazy Bones is about those times.

The song was originally written on acoustic guitar and followed the structure that the final version has here. However, the first arrangement was based around a harpsichord, timpani and echoey piano before being joined in chorus by some glissando brass. Think of Pet Sounds and you wouldn’t be far away. I actually listened back to the verse / chorus loop I created with this arrangement just before writing this post and still quite like what I did. I might upload it just as a separate curio post to let you hear how much your approach to instruments used etc can change a song.

When I came back to do more work to Lazy Bones I think I felt that it needed to be looser; it needed to chug along and get across that sense of contented lethargy. So I set about recording it again using the original acoustic guitar part but with a much freer feel. I concentrated on ignoring (if that’s not an oxymoron) little timing errors and deliberately pushed and pulled at the beat as much as I could.

And, of course, with tongue firmly in cheek, I couldn’t resist finishing it off with an outro swathed in backwards guitar.

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Pretty Polly

I feel there should be some rousing words at this momentous occasion but none are forthcoming.

For the most part with the songs that will follow I’ll gladly go into why they were written, what they are about and all manner of technical hoo-ha. But not this one. Let’s just get comfy first.

For the uninitiated (which is pretty much everyone) best read this, this and this which will, perhaps, help.

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We’ll Get There When We Get There

Part 2 of….who the hell knows how many. If you need to, read part 1 first

While chatting to the ever-wondeful Al on the god-awful set of circumstances that meant I couldn’t do anything with the songs I had written some six months earlier he very kindly offered to lend me a mixer that was lying idle in a cupboard. So, other than constraints of time I had no excuses for not getting at least something recorded: GULP!

And then what? In the cold light of viability my convictions on careers online seemed to resting on less than stable ground – tectonic plates of doubt shifted beneath me, leaving me in the vast crevasse of inertia and threw up mountains of fear above me (yes I do have a penchant for the dramatic!)

In the weeks that I’ve had Al’s mixer I have managed to get a fair bit done – not as much as I would like, mind, but some. I’ve also managed to let John and Al hear the songs that are more “complete” than others and to favourable reactions. That being said, they’re my friends and they would say that, wouldn’t they.

So where are we at? What can I say to sum up what I’m thinking about these songs? Well, here’s some bullet points for your consideration and mine:

• I can’t commit to the JoCo song a week – or any other chronological milestone for that matter. My life just isn’t structured in a way that would allow that.
• I’m still in love with the concept of the album (not concept albums, though- that’s something completely different). I love the idea that a collection of songs sums up what a songwriter or a band were feeling across a period of time. I also really like how songs placed together in a certain way work together. If I hear “Imagine” by John Lennon on the radio or on my iPod, as soon as ends I expect “Crippled Inside” to start. “Heart Of Gold” follows “A Man Needs A Maid”, “The Rain Song” comes after “The Song Remains The Same” and so on and so forth.
• In the post-iPod age, albums have lost a great deal of their significance
• Songs on albums are seldom recorded in the final track-listing order.

Mmmmmmmm, what to do.

So here’s what I propose to anyone foolhardy enough to come along for the ride:

• We Get There When We Get There: I hear-by promise to record and publish when I can. No grand plans for a song-a-week or anything like that but as and when it’s feasible.
• Do What You Like (you will anyway). I’ll continue recording and publishing as I go and once I’ve finished what I think represents a complete album, I’ll post what the running order should be. That way, if you are so inclined, you can arrange the album and listen to it in the way that it should be heard. You, of course are free to completely ignore this and play the songs in order you choose – or not play them at all, natch!
• Your End: My good friend JG says (rightly) that that we should all be more ready to accept that the skills we have are worthy and marketable. So with that in mind, if you unexpectedly find that you like what you hear feel free to stick something in the virtual tip jar – you should see it on the sidebar to your right. With that there’s the possibility that I get to spend more time writing, recording and publishing and you get to download it and hopefully enjoy that too – so we all win. If you can’t donate anything other than some time to spread the word to other people who might also like it, then that’s also cool.

Ok, hang on to your hat, skip; we’re going in. Next Post: Song 1….

Some Relevant Background Material

This is part 1 of a two-part post

It’s not often you have moments of epiphany. Not ones of such clarity, at any rate.

As the car edged its way through the outskirts of Metz and we chatted about the significance of who had been on stereo (well, iPod, but you’ll excuse my prosaic terminology). I found myself talking on 2 fronts and about 2 parts of my life which I had, hitherto, left unconnected: the internet and music.

I was a musician for a long time. It was all I ever wanted to be and, all things being equal, it would be all I would ever want to be. I’ve worked online for a fair amount of time now too and I like to pride myself that I know a fair bit about it. How could I have been so blind?

I watched with interest how bands like the Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen used the internet to promote and project themselves. But I think bands and artists such this simply used the net to reach a point that would be familiar to just about every band before them. That point is old as popular music itself. Only the journey they took is essentially different.

Jonathan Coulton, whom I have mentioned before in this blog, had played frequently during that trip and, I believe, has managed to do something different. Jonathan has managed to build a career that is almost solely based on the internet. As myself, John and Al talked about him approaching Metz we also discussed social networking and about a tipping point where the internet is ubiquitous enough to enough people to make careers online viable, yadda, yadda, yadda. All things I have talked about for a long time. The analogy that came to mind was with careers like architecture: it is a truism that not every qualifying architect will ever get to work on projects such as the ‘Guerkin’ in London or the ‘Birds Nest’ Olympic stadium. However, this doesn’t prevent the architect having a rewarding and prosperous career working on commissions for housing or civic buildings or bridges. The same should follow for music.

Up until very recently the music industry, by and large, has forced musicians to think in terms of a zero sum equation. The rule of the game, when I was involved in it, was ‘all or nothing’ and in the eyes of the industry you had to be the next U2 or there was no point. I bought in to that and when I realised that, for various reasons, this wasn’t going to be the case I felt I had no option but to stop doing it and find something else to do with my life.

The moment of epiphany came as I realised that this may not be the case anymore. By Jonathan’s example I could see that it may now be possible to be a working musician without resorting the weddings / birthday parties circuit – insert Sideshow Bob shudder. Jonathan himself has said in interviews I have read that he knows he will never be huge but he is able to make a decent living. Now, as I say, I do know a fair bit about both music and the internet and I can’t believe how stupid I had been not to see the connection. I just saw them as 2 separate sections of my life. So, I came back from Germany resolved to do, at least something, about connecting those 2 parts.

However, the best laid plans…..or…. as John Lennon once sang; “Life is what happens while you’re making plans”….

It all started so well and in within a few weeks of getting back I had written an album’s worth of material (yes, an album. As I said before, and as unfashionable as it is, I’m an album kind of guy). However, a combination of trying to sort our lives out and the small Behringer mixing desk that I have conspired to put the buffers on, I use the term advisedly; ambition. My mixing desk had a god-awful buzz which I thought, at first, was just a earth loop problem. Further investigation revealed that there must be a fault with it and with fixing it not really high on the list of priorities (read imperatives) the songs lay, for the most part, in my head.

Return Of The “Instant-Web-O-Matic” (patent pending)

It’s not unknown for people who don’t understand the process of the work you do to simply underestimate it. It is, in a way, understandable too. In order gain any real understanding of “that thing you do” those on the outside would have to attain some your skills and, more often than not, there just aren’t enough hours in the day for that.

That aside, there is still a great deal of willful ignorance and dare I say stupidity orbiting planet web – lunacy indeed. Whilst working at a previous employer a colleague and I used to rant joke that all we did was drop the 1400 sheets of A4 paper we would be presented with into the “Instant Web-O-Matic” machine and press the big, green GO button. From there we could fritter away the hours nursing endless cups of tea complain about how over-worked we were.

I’ve been reminded of this while dealing with my current employer who expects a mountain of content to be delivered into a new website – which has itself to be simultaneously developed – before an horrendously unrealistic deadline.

So work has been stressful and demanding and as such has kept me away from, amongst other things, this blog. I know I said to expect a flurry of activity before I lapsed back to languid silence, but this gap in transmission is both as justified as it is unwelcome.

So Long Ago….Was It Just A Dream?

JG was writing yesterday about how he couldn’t understand how the words to various American folk songs from the sixties (Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton etc) had been called into action from who knows what dark corner of his brain. I must say, it’s one of the things I really love about music; some simple words linked inexorably to a melody that can become hard-wired into the fabric of the grey matter. Much like John I can pull lyrical rabbits from dusty, long forgotten musical hats whenever a song from my teens or childhood comes on the radio.

John’s post provoked me to write here on a slightly different subject though. I also watched the Folk America programme on BBC4. However, I tend to watch any programme where the subject is the 1960’s. I’ve always been fascinated by the 60’s. I was introduced to The Beatles – still the greatest band ever and I have short shrift with any opinions to the contrary – when I was in first year at high school. This was in the mid 80’s and it was a badge of extreme independence to be listening to music out-with the prescribed saccharine, chart-based fare.

Curiously, the same soon-to-be-friend who gave me a mix tape of Beatles stuff was also just starting to learn to play guitar and it was that friendship that had me falling, headlong, towards being musician.

From The Beatles we explored their contemporaries, their influences and their progeny – from The Stone and The Kinks to the B.B. King, Muddy Waters and the ocean of bands that followed in their wake throughout the 70’s and 80’s where we found ourselves growing up.

However, as I say, it has been the 60’s that has stayed with me and exerts an almost lunar pull on me whenever its fashion, music, culture or art hove into view. I get this odd tug at the heartstrings; a wistful, nostalgic yearning for a time that , ironically, I never truly experienced.

Jean Paul Sartre wrote of being stuck in hell with the same 2 people; each corner of the infernal triangle tormenting the other 2 forever. If he proves to be right then perhaps the corollary is also true and I’ll happily spend an eternity living and re-living 1960-1969. Somehow I doubt it, though.