You know, back in the day i might not have understood what chords i was fretting, or what key i was playing in, or even how to sing, but god bless me, any time i didn’t think i’d remember how to do one of those things i made little notes in the margin of my lyrics or recorded the song. Which is more than i can say for my current state of affairs.
My goal for this week’s free time (made even more free because E isn’t even here, so i’m completely alone and to my own devices) is that i had to play each one of my 140 completed documented songs all the way through – researching how to play them, when necessary.
It’s funny, spending the better part of your free time listening to lo-fi recordings of yourself from six years ago trying to pick out the bass notes of chords. If i’m ever famous enough to warrant one of those The Early Years collections… oh boy, there’s plenty of crappy early years to choose from. I mean, aside from the hundreds of recordings from the beginning of CK forward. Early.
Anyhow, after 20 minutes of fruitlessly rewinding a real audio file from 1999 that i think was recorded in a spectacular 8-bits of digital sound in a futile attempt to figure out the bridge of the song i wrote on my last day of high school i finally pulled my old lyric book off the shelf to discover that the four weird alternate tuning chords i had been so desperately trying to replicate were printed in neat numerals at the top of the page, dated 6/19/1999.
That makes song 48 of 140 complete.
Fingers just starting to get sore.
[…] Half a decade of intervening years has erased my memory of all but the “greatest hits” of those early songs. In some cases I can still recall a melody, or a few chords, but in others I’m surprised that I even wrote a song by that name. My longtime undercounting of my catalog at 140 songs was a result of this – fully sixty songs has been discarded or forgotten. […]