Another Latest?

 Has it really been five months since my last song?  

This latest one, currently untitled, started with the aforementioned Talk Box.  I think.

Or maybe it started with a video on the 10ths interval... maybe this one.  A bit of noodling and I had some interesting patterns, made more interesting (or not) by using a super cheap analog delay, maybe ten bucks, that works only at low setting and absolutely destroys the fidelity.  It has it's place.  In either case, I wanted the music to be open instead of my usual super-dense constructions.  This spaciness combined with...

I had been reading short stories by Clifford Simak at the time so that's the source of the robot.  Simak wrote in the 40's or so through the 70s.  His robots were intelligent and self-aware, but definitely servants of humans.  These robots would swap out a chip or disk or something and they'd go from being a doctor to a coal miner.  At the same time as these super-advanced robots in the future, there still existed typing pools and switchboard operators.  My robot is an intelligent nuclear-powered worker who fell off a trans-universal freighter, destined to float forever through space with only his thoughts.

A second video gave me some excellent tips on how to arrange strings so they sound, well, like a real composer wrote them.  And man, oh, man do they ever!  I cannot explain how happy I am with how the string section turned out.  Eventually the song turns into an excuse to use my metal-sounding pedals, topped with a warbling accordion melody.  

Somehow the song seems to have a narrative flow which wasn't exactly intended. I found out that in the world of literature, how I write songs is sometimes called the Push Method, where a scenario is created and the author thinks about where the story wants to go from there... and where it wants to go from this second place... and so on.  That's how I often write songs.  I'll have an idea and record it and then thing "What next?"  It's often a right-angle turn but somehow it all flows together.  

Except for my next song, which I hope to start this weekend.  This time I'm ripping off a Tom Petty song and making a more normal song.  Except you can't really rip off someone who uses the chords of A C D G.  And I can't write a normal song.