The last day of The Dusty Mirror scores, and a long day working on the last one. This has been an up and down experience. I'm as happy as ever with the writing and core of the songs, but it's also clear that I can now perform and produce these songs far better. One day, I will do this.
Aside from filing the music, I've tidied up some of the way I store it. I've often kept old and new sequences, the original and the remaster, but not always. It seems wasteful to do so when a new version is almost identical to the original. If the production is largely the same I'll now overwrite it and consider that the definitive version. This relevant to many of my re-recordings or remasters, including some tracks from Synaesthesia and Animalia, some of which were virtually identical. I wanted to hold on to the old versions for reasons of a perfect archive, but in practice I'd never go back and use those when there is a better, newer version. The only reason would be a realisation that the old version was better somehow, but the differences between new and old are often too small to matter and it seems silly to store new and old, so today I've erased lots of old sequences.
Perhaps major record companies keep every tape and copy of every album... a lot of tape. Perhaps they don't(!) but the only value to my older versions is historical, and I have copies of the final track; there's just no need to keep the sequence.
Browsing around, I rediscovered a silly song that I haven't used, but which is largely complete called 'Burning Meat Outdoors' - a satire on barbeques. The Cat Parasites song mentions barbeques, so this seems to be a perfect fit for the end of album, which is now in three rather than two sections. We have a 'broken love' section which makes up the first half, then a few songs which are observations of people, character songs, then the 'cat' sequence at the end.
Last night I wrote a new song for the end of the love section. It uses unusual chords, which ascend every two semitones in major chords. This constant shift of keys makes it challenging to sing and not intuitive melodically, yet pleasantly surprising at every shift. When I played it, it had it a feeling of growth and emergence, which seemed perfect for a love song. The words form a simple poem, and track the feeling of the music:
Anyone can fall in love
Happens every day
The world is full of loneliness
and it can melt away
like a dream
when you give
what is love
but a gift
freely made?
Most records of halves (vinyl) end in quieter, mellow songs. This is due the technical limits of this rubbish format, but the effect is that music culture is now used to albums, our symphonies, which start with a bang and end gently. This form is built into our psyche so I've adhered to it here, though there is little chance of my music ever existing on vinyl (which I like for reasons of pride and association, certainly not audio quality or convenience). This form is notably not like classical music which traditionally starts with a bang, becomes gentle, then ends with a bang.
