I'm struggling with motivation and focus at the moment, eternally worried about the future and my precarious life, but when I'm working on music I'm producing some great stuff, better than ever. This spurs me on.
Today I've recorded, at last, the 'Thinking About The Cats I Used To Know' tune. This was take 6. The first two takes (from weeks/months ago) used different chords, something I didn't notice until I listened back to those today. That one shifts from E-minor and D-minor, with the 'chorus' in F-Major. The new version uses A-minor and E-minor, which is more standard and not quite as dreamy. Perhaps I can revisit the old version in a new work. The final step here was a live recording from a Locus Sonus microphone, this time from Central Europe, and mostly nature sounds with distant cars; perfect.
After that I recorded the final vocal for Excessive Consumption (T-T-T-Time will tell!) and started work on the Cat Parasites song. I've opted for a lush string arrangement for the chorus, which works wonderfully, as epic as Comfortably Numb. I use odd chords here, I was tired of the boring standard ones, so it goes from C-Maj to D-min to Bb-Maj then G#-Maj and G-Maj. I've rewritten lots of new words too. The music was inspired by the atonal Brian Eno song Driving Me Backwards - which is nobody's favourite song. It mentions madness in the words and is a cliché on that theme musically and over its five minutes it never changes pattern. As in poetry, a song needs a singular moment of joy, the focus.
There is more music to write on Parasites. It's taken more than an hour for the very basic strings and drum patterns of this chorus alone. The first verse will probably be solo piano but the words after that have a different structure, so this will probably me a bit 'progressive' in structure - which I'm relishing.
I also sketched out the music for a song called I'm In Love With My Car, which was a written in homage to the Roger Taylor song; mainly because I thought I could write a better song with that idea (although Mr. T was young then, weren't we all!). Here are the words:
I'm In Love With My Car
I'm in love
with my car
It's totally platonic
but it gets me far
I like the way it takes me
from A to B
what is love DM
but reliability?
and when she fails
her MOT
and when she costs me
money I don't have
I'll throw her on the scrap heap
and find a better model
My snap production work has the energy of Lust for Life but clocks in at under a minute.
I've listened this evening to an album by Mike Drew, Museum of Broken Dreams. A lots of nice songs on there, all clever and deep lyrically. Inspiring.
