Sleep
This is the latest track that I’ve finished. I’ve got loads waiting for inspiration, but not many that have found it. Ok, maybe not inspiration, maybe ‘finishing’ would be a better description.
Nothing Is Simple
This was marked ‘private’ but having listened to it again I think it’ probably worth letting out of its cage for a while.
Stronger
This is a song I wrote quite a long time ago. Hmmm, maybe about a year ago, when I was trying to use my acoustic guitar and get a decent sound out of it. I wanted to add a few minimal other bits so that it wasn’t just guitar and voice, and because my voice always sounds better disguised in some way I wanted to add a fair bit of processing to it.
I’m not really sure exactly what it’s about. Probably the same as a lot of the rest of my stuff is about. Good relationships gone bad. Is it any good? I’m not sure I’ve got much subtlety really. I listen to really good lyricists work and I marvel at how they can sound so effortless - make really economical lyrics sound oblique but understandable at the same time. Start writing instrumentals.
What Am I Going To Do?
Here is a very rough outline of a new song. It is the first that I have attempted in a long time which is one of the reasons it has taken me so long to get it into a reasonable state. The voice is a quick demo - the second verse only consists a few phrases cut out of my recorded ramblings. I wanted a bit of electronic-ness bubbling under some more traditional guitar and I have tried a few ‘licks’, I believe they are called, to test out what it might sound like if I went the whole hog and recorded more.
As usual I have recorded a basic Rhodes waffle. I’m not sure if that’s getting incredibly annoying - I just can’t seem to stop putting electric piano as the basis for most of my songs. I also have the feeling the white man reggae might be too much to cope with. I thought it all sounded a bit different from normal, and I did work hard on it, but I think it might be another one that gets resigned to the box marked, ‘ok, try again’.
What Am I Going To Do? (4.9MB Mp3)
What Am I Going To Do?(streaming file)
Missing
I have been having a hard time and concentrating on other things not music for the last five months or so. Doesn’t time fly. I have not written anything or even attempted to mess around with existing songs recently. I don’t know if this is likely to change, but I feel able to log in and do something with this site, now that I have remembered the password.
The other site I was using has expired and I intend to change the way I was using this page. If this becomes more of a personal to do list than a list of my songs then that’s what will happen. I’m under no illusions that anyone actually reads this page, but it’s here when the odd person wants to have a listen to what I have done. I will try to keep the list of songs up to date on the ‘music’ page but I might (or might not) start posting bits of stream-of-consciousness rubbish here that I want to try to remember. I used to just write a post when I had a new song to upload. I think that was a cleaner way to go about things, but I will just see what happens now.
No Way Out
This song is a re-working of the ideas in ‘Coffee’. It’s a weirdly fascinating subject - I have endless American True Crime books lying around the house. I do not read them but I do get the weird urge to look at the photos that are always in this kind of book - men with big seventies mustaches who turned out to be serial killers. I can’t decide if they look like madmen, or just like my dad. Anyway, that was the basis for this song. I also liked the John Fowles book ‘The Collector’ and so this song is my attempt to use that as a subject for a song.
Should Have Seen it Coming
It’s not perfect, but I’m quite happy with this one. I wanted to keep it sparse, especially to let the voice sound out on its own during the chorus. I don’t normally try backing vocals because I think it sounds very weird when one person’s voice is coming from three places at once. Why it works with other singers I don’t know. I tried to change the sound of the voice a bit so that it didn’t sound so strange.
I’m not totally happy with the words - especially the first verse but when I try to get words down I often know what I want to say but not how I’m going to do it. Occassionally, I look at the words for a song and think they all fit well. I’m really pleased with my words for ‘Get What I Want’, for example, but most of the time I have to work really hard to spit out something that gets close to the feeling I was after.
Should Have Seen it Coming (5.2MB Mp3)
Should Have Seen it Coming (streaming file)
Podcast Music
I have been working on a few ideas for podcast music. Anything here is freely available for use on your podcast if you think it would be of use. If you are interested in my electronic/industrial/minimalist style I will also attempt to write music to your specification. My skills are fairly limited but I will give your brief my best effort and see what I come up with. Please get in touch with me at my Noise Project e-mail address if you want me to try something for your production.