Song Studies of Learning
Liner Notes and Listening Room
0629 Song Study of Learning
This was the first track of the new process - two days per song. One to sketch it out, and another to fill in the details. As such, it started with a simple chord progression, and an idea for a chorus. As it was being developed, my son overheard the process and wanted to play a little flute on the track. As we recorded that, I felt like it was going somewhere unexpected. I decided to scrap the lyrics I had in mind and reinvoke a conversation I had with him on a car ride. That he should feel free to explore the world without having a need to fulfill my own expectations of his sense of being. I didn't want him to feel chained to any expectations from me, or chained at all. As we continued I also said I didn't want to give him wings - I didn't want to be flying for him. That my entire job as a parent is to platform him to establish his own personal chains and wings. To foster his own sense of being, responsibility, desire, ability...
And then the song began to take form. It begins with bird sounds - when he was a baby, his favorite album was by a band called Heron, and I have long associated him with birds, but they also fill the wings motif. Leaning on Donovan's "A Gift From A Flower to a Garden" I provided a short spoken word intro which becomes the title of the song in the Exhibition. While he played the flutes first, I adopted some of the melody in the space of the first verse on guitar. This is a teaching act - representationally in the song it is me teaching him a melody to play on flute, but within life, it's actually he who taught me the melody. The song progresses and he plays the flute - rough and honest - and eventually in the final chorus, the flute is replaced with guitar harmonics. This represents the fact that he will sometime leave, but his essence will always be present.
After this phase of creation - this whole Art process, when I get into an actual album, I will not explain the songs in such detail - but as a part of documenting the growth, I think it's important for insight into the process, for those that may enjoy this. But it can also act as a primer for more listening - not even with my work. The moral is... "Sometimes it *is* that deep and intentional." Don't let the world lean on the current popular phrase "It's not that deep."
0701 Song Study of Learning
I did want to explore a variety of styles in this stage, so here is a diversion already. The inspiration here was a conversation at my day job about wiring devices in a PLC network. What was working, what wasn't. "The problem persists" was an explicit take from an email sent to me, as is "The solution exists." As I started going forward, I decided to just recite other relevant electrical terms that may feel like the resonate in the world today. And I do have some belief that the answer lies within us becoming grounded, finding our spark, and taking a moment to breathe.
In the details of this production, I will note that the electrical synth sounds were my own first venture into modifying a synth to get that tonal balance between annoying and tuneful. Additionally, the drifting organ from the first chorus into the second verse was my first attempt at automation clipping. On one last easter egg note (again, no easter eggs will be announced after this re-engagement) the pulsing synth before the second verse is intentionally in the Morse code pattern for SOS. The problems do indeed persist, don't they?
0703 Song Study of Learning
This track started with a desire to lean a little more folky. Specifically, the thoughts of Heron stuck with me, and I wanted to bring some of that. From the "reflection" word as a reference to their song "Upon Reflection" to the environmental sounds at the beginning.
Those sounds at the beginning are from two primary sources - one was a walk from the top of a hill down into my local town's 4th of July parade atmosphere. Focusing on that element, you may hear footsteps, occasional greetings that build fully into crowded conversation. The second is somewhat rhythmic, and that is me tearing out pages from a beat up old book from the thrift store. This is where I source the collage materials for the album covers. It's a bit of a ritual to find books too beat to be used for anything else, then to sit with them and rip out pages, finally to cut from them and file the clippings away for future browsing. These sounds are joined by two keyboard lines - out of time, with mistakes. These were played by my son along side the song. He was just messing around trying to find the notes and a melody. I kept all the messiness of it and then pushed further out the chord progression in order to let his work in learning be naked and present. When I played it for him he looked at me funny at first, until the chords hit right when he found the right notes. We both like this moment.
The lyrics themselves were inspired by a recent comment by Brian Eno, and also the concept of AI music leeching onto Spotify. I don't know that I would qualify perfection and AI generated art as deleterious to art - that's a bigger topic. But this song is designed and even laid out with the idea of embracing human flaws. Which was pretty easy for me - both in singing and playing!
0705 Song Study of Learning
OK. This one was a nightmare! As with everything a seed of inspiration grows. Here I wanted a gentle romantic 3/4 song that was basically inspired by the opening song of the film "Shot In the Dark" - the song is by Mancini and called "The Shadows of Paris" and is totally sublime, and perfectly suited for the layers of personal relationships hidden at the beginning of that hilarious movie.
But I am not there as a songwriter (obviously) and this moves into something different quickly. I think this version salvages enough to make it listenable, but there is some heartache when I hear it. There was a moment in mixing when I accidentally removed the snaps of the tracking and everything fell out of line with each other. In short, it sounded like a total mess - more a mess than it does here. So this song was a bit of frustration - the first such feeling in this process. Not for what you hear here, but for what it could have been.
0707 Song Study of Learning
After what felt like a trudgingly difficult process in the previous track, I wanted something a little more straight forward. I had been watching "Dennis Takes a Mental Health Day" - an episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. There is a song by Roxette ("Listen To Your Heart") and it gave me the idea of doing a little bit of a power ballad. I didn't want it to be too normal, though.
First I decided to write the lyrics about a fading sense of Democracy - not just in terms of the superficial idea of voting, but the erosion of it's benefit when filtered through archiac processes that refuse to change - which is admittedly the anti-thesis of what the founders had intended. I digress - this is not a love song to a person, but to Democracy itself. In addition to that little twist, I injected the airy second verse as a reminder that I don't want to just make a song, but create a little space for it to live.
From a technical side, this song was pretty easy, but there are a couple important changes that happen here. First, I discovered in FL Studio the FPC drum patterns and sounds. Previously (even back 20 years ago) I was manually creating every drum loop. There is benefit to that, so it's not gone for good, but there is a lot of good stuff prebuilt for many applications - and editing the templates is easy peasy. Second, I was trying to sing in an upper register - which you have heard if you have been falling. I don't know why I would go there. After several tries my son came in and simply said "Jeez, sing lower it will sound better." Taking that direct advice was pretty valuable as it was the start of finding a place I am comfortable being heard.
0709 Song Study of Learning
After the straight forward power ballad, the pendulum swung back into doing something I had truly never done before. That sleepy night, which would have been July 8th, I was drifting off and ultimately decided to do some relatively automatic / stream of consciousness writing. In the end, the meaning of this little story is something I too have yet to discover for that reason - but I wanted to "record a dream."
I approached this with synth pads. I created a chord progression and played it at various half intervals. So one has 16 bars for each chord, one is 8 bars and one is 4 bars. I put these over each other and added some reversed nature noises from a walk with a friend. I also added a little piano and recorded the narration.
I do like this little experiment in space building. It has a flow to it that seems to work, but I will admit something. After listening to it, it felt familiar somehow. In a way, it felt the most familiar of anything I had done so far - despite being the one track so far without a direct seed of influence. This drove me crazy for a while until I figured it out. It's *very* similar to the third act of "Beau Is Afraid" - in tone, music and, well, everything. While this was realized after the fact, it's undeniable, and as such, I do think it's eliminated from the Exhibition complilation. It's funny to me that even the circle of 5ths power ballad sounds less strikingly familiar than this little oddball.
0711 Song Study of Learning
This song started with the lyrics, which I couldn't fill out the way I wanted. Fair warning, they may appear again in a different song after I puzzle over them more. Musically I wanted something more strummy, so that explains the extra energy. The guitar leads are essentially sampled and repeated - this was an experiment in service of the song - which is ultimately about understanding why we do the things we do as humans. It seemed to me that grabbing a couple good leads and repeating them exactly would have an eerie human-automation effect. I am not sure that comes through completely.
I did try to enhance this with the vocoder. I am a *big* fan of Neil Young's "Trans" album and was ecstatic to find a vocoder setting that got me there. In the end, I like the simple irony of a robot voice asking very human questions, and then peeling that away at the end to reveal a human behind the scenes the whole time.
One other note - the lyrics drift in this version - if I do it again, they won't - but again I like the irony here. Questions of putting fences around definitions and feelings of things are asked, but the pattern and sheer count of syllables forces them into the space intended for the next line. Eventually the established pattern falls apart as the voice becomes more human.
0713 Song Study of Learning
I had a question when I started the Song Studies. How would I know this phase was over? It turned out I would know because of the smallest feeling - the feeling that something needed more than two nights, and this is the one where that happened. Could I have moved this to a "Clay Chord" easily? Probably, but it seemed dishonest with the process.
So I committed to do my best with this idea. It stemmed from the cut parts of the last song. What if I built up a track from parts, and then once a "wall" of these bits was built, what if I randomly removed parts to "deteriorate" the song? The first cut was exactly this, I built the wall, let it loop for a few bars and then randomly removed parts, slowly at first, and then more aggressively at the end, allowing the wall to return at the end.
On the morning of the second day, I listened to it and had an epiphany - I could play with this more intentionally. So I spent all of the second night building this concept where the decay is present, and then in a second round I also shifted the parts so they became out of synch. This turned out to be effective, but it needed something more, so the melody that emerges from the chaos was added.
The question becomes - was this a success or a failure? I don't really know. I think the melody may outlast its welcome as it continues on. I think that building the chords with notes is pretty cool, but I also thinks that means to "tear it apart" those chords should have dropped out together, instead of note by note. I also think with some more effort, the lost time segment could have been even more interesting. I feel like there could have been some revealed melodic flow in parts - with some more direct editing. In all, it's neither a success nor a failure, but perhaps an invitation to try again.