Lots of work on Dreams Of You today. I started by recording a piano solo for the second solo part. The song structure is verse (Amin), verse (Dmin), chorus, quiet solo, verse (Amin), verse (Dmin), summer solo, winter solo (in chorus chords), verse (Dmin) then final chorus. The summer solo is the same melody and chords as the quiet solo but more energetic; the mood here is happy memories, a summer field and childhood which is dramatically dashed with the 'winter solo', a distorted guitar solo.
My new software feature was so useful with this as both piano solos now sync with the sequence perfectly and allowed me to add accompaniment with much more ease. The tempo is so dramatically uneven that any drums with either solo sounds very odd; no bad thing. I've removed the drums there. I recorded four different guitar solos with different timbres and one with a chorus effect created by my amp, but I think I prefer a dry solo. Then some guitar strums which were made difficult as the chords are odd and fingersome (F major, B flat major, etc. meh!)
The vocals are still to do. This song seems to have taken ages, but I'm reminded that most of my songs of this style take about a week each. I remember when 10 days to composed and record the whole Spiral Staircase album seemed like forever.
There are a lot of anti-male protests occurring. In the street yesterday evening while I was walking to meet Deborah outdoors I passed a woman who said some strange comment as I passed, something "don't look at me then" or something. I wasn't really sure if she did say it to me. The street was otherwise empty but so many people speak on the phone these days, apparently to themselves, and the phrase did seem a bit odd.
These are odd times. The general atmosphere of fear and necessary compliance created by Covid and its restrictions seems to have driven a percentage, a majority, of the population insane. I suspect that the Black Lives Matter movement and similar are primarily due to these psychological pressures. These are unique and extraordinary times. Perhaps the atmosphere of fear in the 1940s, or the nuclear paranoia of the 1950s was similar. Times; thoughts, actions, feel restricted, not free. Perhaps in a few years a new era of peace and love, as occurred in the late 1960s, will appear if free thought, free action, free love is rediscovered by a section of society. Freedom is always appealing and desired, at least art is, can be, must be, free. Like comedy, anything must be acceptable in art. Art is and should be separate from personal, social and political limits. Art is not ever the artist; is is higher, it contains more.
