Two months since my last proper songwriting check-in. Reading my blog of this nature from April, it seems like a world away. A lot has happened, and a lot is about to happen, hopefully. Cryptic I know. I’ll get round to explaining it all.
I do blogs like this as much for me as anyone else, as it helps me to consolidate what I’ve been working on, and to help me make sure I’m being productive. Right now songwriting has no deadline for me, which makes it dangerously easy to lose track of. I’ve realised it’s like going to the gym, it’s easy to be distracted by things that appear to need more attention, and before you realise it, all your hard work has been for very little.
Last Time...
In April I was talking about a set of songs I’d written in an open ‘D’ tuning, and that was about as far as I’d got. Open ‘D’ as a reminder, is where you tune all the strings of your guitar to the notes of a ‘D’ major chord. I did write a blog immediately after that explaining how you do that in more detail, which you can read here :
For those of you who read that one and have given me some feedback on it, I appreciate I owe you an ‘open tunings part 2’ - I’ll do that soon. If I ever promise to explain something more fully and I don’t, please feel free to pull me up on it!
Anyway, after that set, I tried open ‘G’ - this works to the same principle obviously, but I didn’t find it quite as revelatory as open ‘D’. Maybe my tuning pegs were a bit worn out, I dunno, but it did produce a song called ‘I Slept Across America’ which I’m quite proud of.
Since then I have reverted to standard tuning for my more recent attempts, and have got some more tunes I’m pretty pleased with. ‘She Only Thinks About You’ is a reminder about not appreciating your partner. ‘A Letter’ is about trying to desperately tell somebody how you feel, and generally failing miserably, and ‘The Credit’ is about a story a friend told me about how their ex partner used to try and take the credit for their achievements. I feel like that one could do with a better title, but these are all works in progress. ‘I Wrote It In A Song’ is ironically, barely a song, about writing songs. It’s interesting but it feels a bit contrived. I’ve written songs like this before, usually after I’ve accidentally listened to ‘Walken’ by Wilco, which has that same vibe. You can listen to it here if you’d like… It's not an exciting video, but all the live ones have awful sound and you can't hear the words so...
There’s also ‘I Got Mine’ which is a bit different, so I’ll definitely pursue that, and ‘Getaway Driver’ which uses a riff intro I wrote so long ago I simply can’t remember. That doesn’t happen to me very often. I don’t save up bits of lyrics and riffs for later potential use like a lot of people do, but it does occasionally happen. The riff might be better than the rest of the song, I don’t know yet. I’m still in that place where I’m just so flippin’ happy to have found it a reasonable home that I haven’t fully considered how suitable that home actually is.
That gets me up to date, that doesn’t seem too bad, there’s plenty for me to work with. Oh I almost forgot! I wrote a little song to go with the second half of my upcoming ‘Desert Island Discs’ blog with Phil Lymbery. That can go on the pile too.
In Other News...
In other songwriting news I had a meetup with Kate Harding a few weeks back to try and put some music to some of her new song ideas. Kate, you might recall launched her debut single ‘Wallflower’ a few months ago, and we (The Alabama Stills) were her backing band at the launch party. Anyway, some time was spent on that, and I’ve submitted a few ideas to Kate for her to have a think about, when she gets the chance. She’s a busy lady. On a side note, the other side of our arrangement, for her to be a guest vocalist with The Stills has also been making headway, and she’ll be appearing with us for a few numbers this Saturday night if all things go to plan.
At the beginning I alluded to ‘things happening’. It’s been my intention for a while to try and set up some systems for me to actually start properly collecting and, in a fashion, recording all the songs I’ve written, so that I actually have something to show for all the effort. I mentioned joining the PRS a few blogs ago, that’s part of it, you can read about that here…
Some of my songwriting time has therefore been put into setting all this up. Website, social media accounts, artwork is all just about online and ready to go. I’ll explain more about how I’d like it to work when there’s actually a bit of content for you to check out. There’s nothing worse than people asking you to check out websites and follow pages with no particular content. It’s like going to a hotel to find they haven’t built the pool or the restaurant yet, and it’s thirty miles out of time. You can go there but……
Anyway, when I’ve put in the pool, the restaurant, arranged taxis to all the good nightspots and installed a free mini bar in each room, I’ll invite you along.
Cheers!
Comments