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Lately, through listening to so much music, I've realised why I find it so difficult to write it. When I think, when I dream, and when I close my eyes and just imagine an original piece of music, it sounds abstract. It sounds fragmented and epic. It's rock, but it's orchestral, big, brave and pompous. Like (so you can try to imagine): Tool (chuggy riffs with mental time signatures) crossed with Devin Townsend (metal wall of sound), but less... together? It doesn't follow a pattern or a particular beat. It's like the sounds are making a picture, rather than a specific tune/song. The best thing I can use to sum up what I'm getting at when I say 'sounds that make a picture' is Dig Me, by King Crimson. It's a piece that uses guitars and drums to make noises that remind one of the sounds one would hear on some sort of an industrial scrapyard. Machines and mechanics. I don't know really. It's kind of eerie. I imagine a car crusher going about its business in a scrapyard, but it's still in a vaguely tuneful way, with a repeated little 'chorus' throughout. The spoken-word lyrics that describe an old car being left to rot add to the picture of course.
That's nothing like the music in my head, but the stuff I do have in there is awesome. I'd love to get it recorded, but it's obviously going to sound ridiculously pretentious and amateur. I've always stuck to trying to make 3-minute pop songs because that's what people want to hear and it's really what somebody with my limited technical ability 'should' be doing. I have trouble writing them, so that's where I'm going wrong. Dave says he has tons of songs in his mind and he has to write them down and make them happen or he'll explode. It's like a requirement, and he has the ability to grab a bit of paper and scribble ideas down and record them in five minutes and make a hit single out of nowhere. I sort of feel like it's a requirement for me to make music, but have no way of getting it out. I'm rubbish at playing instruments (apart from a bit of self-taught piano). I am certainly no wordsmith. I can't do poetic, I can't do messages, I can't do a catchy verse-bridge-chorus and when I try to it sounds contrived and horrible. I like to sing, and I hate singing other people's lyrics, so I used to write my own for Symbiosis. I did a couple of good lyrics, but I ditched words for oohs and aahs where possible and I'd talk about 'sections' instead of verses and choruses and I'd encourage the production of progressive rock beasts of songs. My songs begin somewhere and end up somewhere else completely. I have five or six songs at the moment but I can't tie things together. I gave up one particularly ambitious one for Body By Design, and even that one (which was written when I wasn't feeling particularly epic or ambitious) Dave had to rein in and make more rounded and catchy. Ugh. I'm an art-rock musician in a pop musician's body.
Golliwogg's Cakewalk by Claude Debussy. Tune. It's so nuts. I've been wanting to know the name of it for flippin' years, and now I know! Who'd have thunk it, Skins giving me a lesson on early 20th century music!
That's nothing like the music in my head, but the stuff I do have in there is awesome. I'd love to get it recorded, but it's obviously going to sound ridiculously pretentious and amateur. I've always stuck to trying to make 3-minute pop songs because that's what people want to hear and it's really what somebody with my limited technical ability 'should' be doing. I have trouble writing them, so that's where I'm going wrong. Dave says he has tons of songs in his mind and he has to write them down and make them happen or he'll explode. It's like a requirement, and he has the ability to grab a bit of paper and scribble ideas down and record them in five minutes and make a hit single out of nowhere. I sort of feel like it's a requirement for me to make music, but have no way of getting it out. I'm rubbish at playing instruments (apart from a bit of self-taught piano). I am certainly no wordsmith. I can't do poetic, I can't do messages, I can't do a catchy verse-bridge-chorus and when I try to it sounds contrived and horrible. I like to sing, and I hate singing other people's lyrics, so I used to write my own for Symbiosis. I did a couple of good lyrics, but I ditched words for oohs and aahs where possible and I'd talk about 'sections' instead of verses and choruses and I'd encourage the production of progressive rock beasts of songs. My songs begin somewhere and end up somewhere else completely. I have five or six songs at the moment but I can't tie things together. I gave up one particularly ambitious one for Body By Design, and even that one (which was written when I wasn't feeling particularly epic or ambitious) Dave had to rein in and make more rounded and catchy. Ugh. I'm an art-rock musician in a pop musician's body.
Golliwogg's Cakewalk by Claude Debussy. Tune. It's so nuts. I've been wanting to know the name of it for flippin' years, and now I know! Who'd have thunk it, Skins giving me a lesson on early 20th century music!
