Rainy Day Lover

Here's a new song. I wrote it one rainy day this last Winter, and recorded it, and sent it to my lover to share the feeling of being away from her in the drip of Berkeley. Since then, I've worked on the verses and lyrics and turned it into a full song, but this first recording was done in a few hours just to capture that mood.

Rainy Day Lover (partial demo)

Here are the lyrics for the full song form:

And I hear
music
music for a rainy day
music for a rainy day
a rainy day love

and I hear music
in the street
in the tyres
in the rain
in the low flying airplanes
I hear

music for a rainy day
music for a rainy day

and I hear music
in the sky
in the trees
in the birds
in the leaves
on the ground
in the rain
in the arms of an oak tree
with you
my rainy day love

music for a rainy day
music for a rainy day

rainy day love
a rainy day lover

music for a rainy day
music for a rainy day

Naked: The Songwriting Process

I thought it would be interesting to share the steps of creating a new song. I have many different ways I approach a new song. Described below is my process for a new song, "It's Time."

But first, a bit more about process. Some songs are lyric-driven; some are melody-driven; some by harmony. On another level, some come from a musical perspective (e.g. I'm interested in a groove, harmony, or melody working together), and some from an emotional place. Songwriting for me seems to be the most effective way to express emotions, both for getting them up and out of my body, and for sharing them with people. So even though I may be working with sounds, many times those sounds come from an emotion or feeling. I think this is what makes songwriting and singing so much more effective for me than cartooning, writing, or talking.

Melody-driven songs for me come from singing a line and playing with it. I like melodies that weave around and surprise, so I will modify my lines with intervalic jumps and mode changes until a nice melody emerges, usually while walking around.

Harmony-driven songs will come from two sources: 1) finding some nice changes on the guitar or piano, and then freestyle singing over the changes; 2) singing harmonies to melodies, before the changes are implied.

If the vocal has emerged as driving, the fun begins when I try to fit chords to the harmonies using Jazz harmony theory, and a bit of prankiness.

And, of course, the groove has to be there. For me, it comes while working the chords or bass lines, and is part and parcel of the noodling and playing. Workshopping the song with other players, or rolling out an unfinished song at a jam is my favorite process for refining the groove.

The lyric driven ones can come from an idea or emotional state, and I put myself into a trance and start pouring out lyrics either into a recorder, or pen-and-paper. O Youth [listen] was written with a broken hand while on Oxycodone--the whole lyric came out in one stream, in as fast as I could write it with my gimpy hand.

Mary [listen] was written from both directions. I was driving back and forth between Vermont and Brooklyn, and I kept tossing the lyrics around in my head. During the same time, I was working on two different guitar bits, in different keys. Guitar parts tend to sound right in only one spot on the neck, based on how the open strings sound for each chord voicing. So there was this spanish bit, with a gypsy change in open Em, Am, C, and B7, and then another bit, this pop song going between Gmaj7 and E. Normally, that is not a traditional change, because if you want to stay modal, Em is the relative minor to G, so to change you go to some other key. But E to Gmaj7 sounds great, and I didn't know what I'd do with it, but I'd sit there for half an hour just playing the changes and looking for more chords in the sequence. Then one day, fresh back in Vermont, fresh from bustle-y New York, alone with my guitar in the cavernous living room, coming up with fresh lyrics for the E/Gmaj7 part, I realized that the two musical sections matched the two word pieces--one angry, one hopeful--and I tried to glue the two sections together, even though the modes were weird together. Then I flushed out the lyrics by walking around the house and gardens, guitar strapped on, playing the song about fifty times, running back into the house to find the pencil and paper lying on the kitchen counter to scribble down the latest lyric. Somehow it worked.

Here, now, is an unpublished, unfinished song, in the very first stages. Song titles usually come last, but for now this one is named for its hook: "It's Time." I now have the luxury of an Android X, with the wonderful apps Rehearsal Assistant and FourTracks Lite, which let me record while walking down the street, siting in the kitchen, whatever. So I've uploaded the first takes of coming up with a new song.

These are in the order that I recorded them, all within about half an hour of each other, so you can hear, plainly, the raw process.

It's Time (worshiping)

It's Time (intro)

It's Time

It's Time (guitar section)

The next step I took with this song was to walk around and sing the hook over and over, looking for more lyrics to pop into my head. Then I fired up FourTracks Lite on the phone, and did a freestyle recording, trying some harmonies.

It's Time (harmony)

The next step will be to write more lyrics. This song is heavily based in an emotion, an idea, a hope of transitioning from a stuck place in life to another place, with a feeling of waking up from a dream, somehow hoping that the waking life will be as joyful as the dream life, without nightmares, and relying on something greater than myself for strength, through some kind of faith. Though ultimately, faith must be in ourselves.

This will involve, if past songs are any indication, sitting down in my yard or kitchen, and recording or writing freestyle until some tasty words come out, and riff on those. If I'm stuck or coming up with something trite, I use word association to break out and get into some kind of flow. Then I'll work those with the music some more, guitar in hand. Then, I'll fire up ProTools and start laying down tracks and harmonies and see what else happens.

Eventually, this song is going to need some kind of change, transition, or bridge. Hopefully that will come out of monkeying around. I tend not to use any kind of classical, Tin Pan Alley, Nashville, or any other process, because I don't like to write songs that sound like they followed a formula. My only real trick here is to play around with different keys on the guitar, or piano, or vocal freestyle until something fresh-sounding pops out. To help in this process, I try to transition to the most "out" mode I can go to from the current mode and see what works while being distinctive. On the guitar or piano, this can sometimes sound like random jumps, which is what they are, until I hear something fun.

Stay tuned for later posts on this song as it develops.

kronos quartet @ zellerbach 2010.9.26

post-coital latte
sipping
tripping
zellerbach dipping
kronos
twitching
like a katydid

Facebooked

billg
wants to be
the gatekeeper
grabbing his keep

Larry Elison
the robinhood
turned highwayman

There is no emperor
no king
but we all ho our digital lives
to the grand master pimp google

Selling ourselves
pimped
web 2.0
ad slaves
I am content
I am owned
I am a number
bought and sold
data-mined
face-booked

Hot Whole to Go

I'm tryin to be a hippie
on my patch of ground in Berkeley
But the patch under my teepee
just went to 1.2
million dollars
1.2 million dollars

Now I'm sortin out my garbage
in little eco-baggies
recycling, strolling, drinkin coffee
eatin cheezeboard pizza too
million dollars
1.2 million dollars

I'm tryin to be a hippie
livin in North Berkeley
3 cheese kalamata basil
3 cheese kalamata basil
and a hot half to go
no
make mine
a hot whole to go

But I'm losin my redneck cred
(o he's losin his redneck cred)
yes I'm losin my redneck cred
livin here on brioche bread
havin cappuccino in bed
I'm going back to da land instead...

The Sun God

Is it better to see the works
of the Creator
or the Creator itself?

Lift your eyes to the Sun
but look ye not into the Sun
you cannot but stare at the Creator
and not go blind

The silver white sun-god
in the billowing clouds
or the virgin white clematis
with dew-yellow lips
she glows in fog
but she kisses in sunshine

Inquisition

Prompt: "Write about something from the past that continues to haunt, shame, or mortify."

---

I am standing at the top of the basement staircase.

I don't know how old I am, but there is a yellowed, plastic rotary phone hanging on our kitchen wall with a long spiral cord that is always twisted, and is fun to untwist, like Sisyphus, and there is real linoleum on the floor, not the crappy, shiny vinyl Armstrong tile that a future roomer will convince my mom to install after my dad moves out and my mom rents out every room but mine and sleeps in her red Volkswagen camper van in the carport. Which means I'm somewhere between 6 and 9 years old. Coming up the stairs are my older sister, Martha, and my mom. One holds incriminating evidence; both look concerned, with the same look that my dad and my step-mother will use on me years later when it is discovered that my sister has given me LSD twice. In the stairwell, my sister begins the interrogation. My sister, three years older than me, puts on her best adult voice.

"We found this paper, which is in your handwriting, wherein you describe this wonderful project and idea that you want to implement. But since this paper has come to our attention, we noticed that you have done nothing on this project, and, in fact, have hidden this paper, or worse, neglected it, in amongst mom's sheet music and used paper stacks."

My mother: "Yes..." followed by smarmy, overly concerned, falsely sympathetic grimacing.

My sister: "Ahem. Yes. And we are concerned that this pattern could negatively affect your future. This inability to complete projects after you've started them."

I have walked the streets of Calcutta, India, and seen poverty. I have peed in closets in seedy hotels in the Tenderloin in San Francisco. And here, in Berkeley, I have met crazy people, hippies, and dropouts. But this new information puts the fear of future failure in me where before I had only envisioned a life of singing, gardening, riding bicycles, building things, and possibly flying to the moon. My mother, always energetic, always laughing at the gods, and always dragging me with her into the AV room at the elementary school around the corner so that I could crank the handle on the mimeograph machine to spit out sweet, acrid, chemical smelly, blue printed pages of "handouts", programs, song sheets, flash cards and other devices of a music teacher, and always at the last minute, chimes in:

"We're concerned about your future. Why? Why did you write this? Don't you want to work on it any more?"

They read the paper to me. It is foggily familiar. I wrote it. Having dreamt up an idea, and written about it, I have lost interest in it. The paper still wags its incrimination at me from my sister's hand. I want to disappear down the stairs, the rough, furry timbered stairs, with painted treads, and a large, plank desk built in at the landing and knotty pine shelves that my dad built for my mother so she could have an "office" where she kept her extra sheet music (piles of Für Elise and Bach minuets for her piano students) mixed in with her "handouts," some active, and some relics from student sing-alongs and tie-dye parties. I love this stairwell. It is fun to climb, to lounge, to converse on. It is possibility. It is descent into the true heart of the house. Past my mom's music-and-activism mimeograph marketing collection, is the basement with exposed timbers, secret passages, a laundry chute, my brother's photography darkroom with its mysterious folded entrance that excludes all light even though there is no door to close, and my dad's woodshop where I make musical instruments of my own invention, and help build parts from exotic woods for my dad's boat. But I can't descend into the chthonic, safe, earthy, woody and warm world, because the Hydra, one claw on my paper dream, and one snakey eye on my dreamy, powerless mother, is blocking the path of Hephaestus.