A slow, unhappy and difficult day (despite my brilliant treatise on economics). I've been working a lot on three old songs: Light Blue Evening, The Invisible Man, and Joey Deacon: The Best Spastic in the World. These certainly sound better now than when I first recorded them, but I'm not enjoying the process. The songs seem old and of the past for me, perhaps even churning up unhappy memories of my doomed romance (though, the romantic in me would prefer a doomed romance to none at all). I would, ideally, like to unite the songs and create a unifying concept. Maybe they are worth a small EP of 'old songs'. Any art is better than none - but I must keep standards reasonably high.
Yet, these songs, I remind myself, are good enough to deserve some sort of outing. Feelings and art - bah! This is a problematical combination. The quality of one's creation needs to be judged rationally and without emotion otherwise the goal keeps moving and every alternative feels as good as any other, like a mush.
The Joey song, actually a touching and sad song about the fun children used to make of this disabled literary figure, is very electronic and minimalistic in production; this works, but the strongly electronic nature of it jars with the natural vocals. I don't want to, will never ever, use autotune - that will kill emotion, but here, it's real-world sound stands out. My solution is to change the pitch of the electronic instruments to make them out of tune and so more natural. This works brilliantly. I'm reminded that the early electronic instruments, those Moogs of the 60s as used by The Beatles on Abbey Road, were notorious for going out of tune. Perhaps this actually helped them blend in better. As I've said before, by the mid-80s, everything electronic was ruining every song with its harsh knives of scaffolding, cutting up the delicate real-world instruments and vocals. Most songs now make everything sound (or be) electronic, rather than make the electronics sound real.
