One track of The Golden Age remains. I wrote the words a few days ago, I now much prefer to start with the words. Songs sometimes magically appear, words and music all together, but they tend to be simplistic outpourings of the mind at time and often musically and lyrically predictable, easy, and trite. The words are so crucial for painting a picture, telling the story, that I use these as key hooks for the music, what to represent when. Music can suggest an idea, too, however, but doing things this way seems to extract something unusual, unpredictable from the music. I also prefer the words to be semi-poetic, not too poetic, not of regular scan or rhyme. Again, that would be too easy, too boring. The words must tell a story all alone, as must the music, and both together should be better than either alone. The first draft of the words were:
Welcome To My Gallery
So you want to be an artist?
Are you ready for some times of pain?
Of madness?
Welcome to my gallery of failed ambitions.
Pull up a chair, and pipe and muse upon your greatness
before you worry about the bills and the void of indifference, the scorn that awaits your quest for something pretty,
worthy of your name,
your quest to extract the best
of your soul's marrow.
Take your oil and your earth
and run to a grave of glory.
Will you pay the price?
Will you pay the price?
Welcome to my gallery.
I divided them to form approximate verses:
So you want to be an artist?
Are you ready for some times,
of pain?
of madness?
Welcome to my gallery
of failed ambitions.
Pull up a chair, and pipe
and muse upon your greatness
before you worry about the bills
and the void
of indifference, the scorn
that awaits
your quest for something pretty,
worthy of your name,
your quest to extract the best,
of your soul's marrow.
Take your oil and your earth
and run to a grave of glory.
Will you pay the price?
Will you pay the price?
Welcome to my gallery.
Then started on the music by improvising. I watched an Oberheim OB-X8 demo yesterday, with some incredulity and amusement. It's a lovely instrument, but, at £4000 for an old-school analogue synthesizer, is more like a toy for rich people than a practical instrument - at least, everything can be duplicated in low-cost software or even much cheaper synthesizers. I listened to the presets on a YouTube video and, simultaneously in Prometheus copied several with ease. Perhaps this is also an indicator of the power of my software, but many software synths, even free ones, can duplicate 90% of the sounds. There are some specialised cross-modulations, like 'hard-sync' and different uses of the LFO and effects like a semitone-step-portamento (this is technically glissando) but Prometheus can do that, and everything the OB-X8 can and more.
My digression is here because the sounds (which are indeed beautiful - the OB-X8 is a lovely instrument!) inspired me to compose an analogue synth sequence. I made some dancing saw waves and shifting, modulating chords using detuned saw waves, one with a synchronised reset. The chords were C-minor, Bb-Major, C-minor then D#-Major. I chose the chords because they were pretty and a little odd. I left that and went to the piano, with the words, and decided on those chords for the first 4 lines, but broke into D# for the "of pain" line - hitting an awkward B note for ugliness, then moved to E-minor and then E-Major for the "of madness".
This lead easily into A-minor, then down the G-Major for the second verse, which is something of a main chorus (as the title line suggests). For variety, I then shifted up into the unusual G#-Major and then Bb for the next two lines which pulled me back towards C-minor for the "bills" verse. This, I imagined as a single note and chord, blusey and wailed in the vocal.
This breaks, in my plan, back to the chorus chords, which then break into F-Major and C for the "oil" and "grave" lines, before we return to the opening chord sequence for "Will you pay the price", but I'm not sure how it will all fit yet.
So far I've put together the first two verses and they sound surprisingly good considering the odd chords and melody. I'm struck by the amazing amount of musical influences on this single song, but pleased by them too.
