It's been nearly a year since I last felt compelled to write anything down. Since then I've been practicing the cello more or less faithfully and I must say, it's a beast. It is easily the most difficult instrument I've tried to learn. Even now, almost a year in, if I don't play for a week then I squeak and hit multiple strings and generally make a racket. However I also finally caved and bought a real wooden cello, that is if a $250 Glarry cello counts.
So about this latest song.... I wanted to capture my thoughts about it before I forgot them forever.
My intention was to make a normal, straight-forward song, using a melody from the verse of a Beatles song as the chorus as my starting point. Big glassy guitar chords played against three part vocal harmonies, interrupted by a thick and gnarly fuzz riff. Okay, so maybe not so normal. But I tried to stick to more normal verse and chorus format, except I started with the chorus. And no two verses share the same pattern. And even though I had the (stolen) melody for the chorus, I had no idea of what to do for instrumentation on the verse, except that I wanted it scaled back. So I kind of played the melody and noodled a bit, doing my normal method of recording me singing a guitar part and then figuring out how to play it. It works, at least for me.
Somewhere along the line I found myself playing bongos in the bridge and realized that my life wouldn't be complete without a Talk Box effect. Fortunately I found one that doesn't use the drooly tube and also had pitch correction on it, which instantly boosted the quality of my cello playing. So throw the cello on there. Plus an instrumental passage. And a key change. Somehow my simple and sparse song bloated to 50 tracks (although, for example, the bass uses five different tracks throughout the song because of different tones and whatnot). And also somehow, even with 50 tracks, it remained less busy than most of my songs.
In talking through this I thought about the song pattern, so maybe it's Chorus / Verse / Chorus / Alt-Verse / Bridge / Instrumental / Key Change Chorus / Ending
See? Pretty normal!
For the lyrics, well, for decades I've had a song from Merry Melodies/Bugs Bunny floating around my head, "I Only Have Eyes For You", to which my faulty brain adds "They're in a jar on my dresser." Jumping from there I played with other phrases, like giving away your heart or asking for someone's hand.
Here it is, in case I ever want to zero in on it again.
Now it's time to finally finish the song for Tim Chandler.
