Back to work on my new album today, and production work on the three final tracks: 'Burning Meat Outdoors' (another fast-paced surrealistic race, a bit like 'Someone Else's AI' from We Robot), 'Pictures on my Telephone', and 'Anyone Can Fall In Love', which was originally called 'A Gift Freely Made', but the first words are more memorable.
Most of today was work on Pictures on my Telephone. The sounds are much more electronic than I first envisaged, which was something like Heartbreak Hotel, but I realised that I should actually move in the opposite direction and aim for a highly electronic sound, partly for this very reason, that classic blues is rarely electronic. Also, the song is about technology so the timbre should be too. My recent toying with the Microkorg has reawakened an interest in analogue waves, too. Much of the song was balancing noise and silence, sharp dramatic stabs lead to pregnant silences.
Finally, work on the new song, 'Anyone Can Fall In Love'. It will follow Telephone, so I began by using the same bass, but I realised that the dead end of Telephone must remain. The sounds here remain electronic and analogue. I made some simple synth-strings using saw and pulse waves and band-pass sweeps, and added a regular pulse of a saw, a little bit like the intro to 'My Baby's Non-Binary'. These however, play along more to the melody. They also start in the centre, then move apart spatially, alternate notes to extreme left and extreme right, like distant lovers singing to each other. At the end of the song these pulses re-unite; a romantic gesture in one tone and told entirely in stereo placement.
There are some Vangelis-style brass sweeps, and much romantic drama. Perhaps I need to add some booming drums or gongs like Ultravox's 'All In One Day', but as things are it still sounds rather nice, epic, lovely.
The vocals for these all need doing. Hopefully I can record these tomorrow morning. Deb is too ill with a cold-like virus for us to attend the open mic on Tuesday. She is coughing and probably infectious, so the lack of attendance is as much precautionary for others as it is for her health. Still, I aim to sing on Tuesday, as has become my regular day.
I'm really pleased with this album and must make plans for its release. For a title I toyed with two: Cat Parasites, as named after one track. This would be a play on Bowie's Diamond Dogs. I've decided on A Drive Through The Town though, making this a partner or follow-up to A Walk In The Countryside. There is a cat link between both albums, and as a pair they pay homage to Queen's A Night At The Opera and A Day At The Races (and those in turn paid homage to the Marx Brothers).
The cover art will, as Queen's did, be an approximately negative version of the other. I'll release singles, press CDs, and do more for this album, a worthy successor to We Robot, but there is a lot of work, a lot of months, to come yet.
A P.R.S. payment came today and I found the stats interesting. My most popular tune in terms of raw performances was 'There Is No Love, and the More I Search the Less I Find' from The Love Symphony, via YouTube India. The most royalties came from 'Lou Salome Remembers' the biggest European hit, and indeed lots of the Salomé album is popular, more than expected. 'The Planet's Oracle' is the most popular vocal track, with 420,000 plays in Spain, for example, and 'Sit With Your Ghost' is popular too. Of my songs, the most popular is 'You Make Me Happy', with 1.5 million performances via YouTube India, but a large 149,000 in the UK, and over 10,000 in Germany, France, South Africa, and Sweden. In the UK, my next most popular song was 'Remembrance Service' from that album. I find these statistics fascinating and encouraging, but I'm unsure what they really mean. They do however indicate growth over time, and with each passing quarter, so that must be a good thing.
Many of my songs from The Dusty Mirror onwards were, for me, conscious exercises in training; certain to be improved upon, and always intended to be remade at some point. No matter how things are now, things are getting, and will get, better.
