The song i posted ealier is coming along well, although the “cough” and “rent” lines aren’t coming off as i would like them to. Oh, and it’s only 2minutes long, so i’m not sure if it needs another verse or if it’s just a short song.
by krisis
songwriting
Writing songs is getting a bit iffy… i either jump into an alternate tuning and use typical bass notes, or just wing it into a typical C-G-D, Em-C, or D-A-Bm-G progression in some other key. I can’t even remember how to write a good song… i suppose it just comes to you…
If i could choose one of my favourite songs to own as though i wrote it myself, it might be this one:
out here when you light a smoke on the porch you can hear the paper burning the moon is the only light; in the silence you can hear it turning down over the ridge by the highway you hear the cars come and fade it’s like that out here, you can hear things from miles out and miles away/ out here i make the only human light, i am the only human sound it’s my privilege to lie awake at night and think of what i lost, hope for what might be found out here you find out who your friends are when the darkness comes to kill the day there’s an ache in every corner of the heart for the ones who are miles away/ out here there’s always work to be done and i do what i can came down to a choice: love or run. i ran winter will come and get a hold on my heart and i will long for your touch wonder what kind of fool am i, why’d i leave it if i loved it so much?
i will call you, struggle for the words to say swear that i am working on what keeps me miles away/ out here it’s not as bad as i tell it — got your rocks, rivers, trees
nothing comes easily but what does has brought at last a little peace out here it’s so silent you can hear your heart talking one day that heart might tell you which way to go, and you might start walking/ you know that i will, know that i will – ‘out here’ peter mulvey
Trio: Season 1, #2
New Trio is up and featured a bit more prominently on the sidebar (god only knows how people were expected to find the link from last week, ‘cuz i don’t). I encourage you to listen to it, since this entire site really did start from my music (which remains the center-piece). This blog just adds background to where i’m coming from in my songs.
On that note, i’m gonna talk about “deadweight,” which is one of the songs from this week. I originally wrote the lyrics in July of 1999, and then arranged it in early August. When i first wrote the lyrics i thought they would head in the musically jerky direction of Elastica’s “Hold Me Now,” but i wound up being more influenced by my summer obsession with Melissa Ferrick (one part Ani, one part Melissa Etheridge, shake well). I actually didn’t think “deadweight” would amount to very much at all, which is evidenced by the fact that i wrote it upside down in the margins of another song (which remains unused).
The chorus came first to me first: here i was headed to college while some people seemed to be intent on keeping me rooted to the spot where i stood in every sense. While most people tend to think the song is about my mother once they hear that much about it, it’s actually about a friend of mine from highschool. He was perfectly fine as a friend, but his whole life was centered very much around secrecy, competition, and negative energy. I increasingly found that being with him kept me rooted in the catty snappish spot i spent much of high school in, and i didn’t want to be there anymore. However, as many times as i tried to “cut him loose” in the past, i always wound up friend with him again. Realizing all of this in “deadweight” put an end to the vicious cycle; i haven’t spoken with him since.
For more commentary you can head here or here. Audio of “deadweight” and most other songs i mention can be found in the AMkitchen, which is the core of my webpage.
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Sometimes i think of the title for a song and just need to write “that” song. Writing towards a title is harder than writing from a line or a chord progression, because you have nothing and still need to go in a certain direction. For a long time i wanted to write a song called “As If,” because i felt like it was a great title. When i finally managed to cobble together something that ended its choruses in those words i wasn’t impressed: the song just didn’t live up to the name i had imagined for it.
Earlier this summer i got sunburnt very badly on the bottoms of my arms, and it annoyed me to death. While spending several uncomfortable days waiting for my skin to heal, i thought that i might like to write a song called “Burn.” I never did anything about it, but i suppose the word was floating somewhere in the back of my mind ready to be included in any son in progress.
Last night i wrote “Burn.” The lines started coming to me and i opened up blogger and started to write, figuring it was more trustworthy then my email program, and that it would be on the page today for me to practice. I finished it in under five minutes; it just flowed out like water through a dam. I pressed “post & publish.”
And i’ll never see those words again. Sure, i managed to reconstruct the bare bones of what i was writing, but several turns of phrase were lost forever to the infinite wasteland of the internet. I went through my cache, checking every file written to in the 20 minutes surrounding the disaster, but found nothing.
Impermanence frightens me. Maybe i need to become a more deliberate and organized person, but there’s always that chance that disaster will strike as you hit the save button. And every time it does i lose a piece of my life’s story. Hopefully this one’ll go through.