let's see...
in the upsidedown cat timeline, which is very hazy because i don't know if any of my songs are "finished" and i'm usually working(or at least thinking) about a couple at a time...the next songs i came up with were "something like that" later know as "
orange(you glad)", and with a new set of lyrics it now has evolved into "
green sparklers".
i think the orange lyrics are funny, and cool cuz brianne and i once did a power point presentation for french class in high school about orange french things... like traffic cones, and carrots... yeah, the teacher wasn't too impressed, everyone else did cheese and chateaux. oh well, we had fun. (anyone know how to post power points on the web?)
i love "green sparklers" very much. and yeah, my parents really did make a small version of mount hood in my backyard one year out of snow, though i have a feeling the sparklers might have actually been silver, but i'm not sure. it was around new years, and i was pretty young.
i'm realizing this version of the song came a lot later than i thought. with this recording, the order is fine, but i'd record it differently, (same with most of my songs- it seems like once it's recorded, by working through that process, i've gotten a better idea of what i actually want them to sound like. and recordings are always different, cuz if you listen to the ending, all of that is improv'd, cuz i was recording, and didn't know how to end the song, so i just kept singing.)
recordings are all different moments, one way a song could be played. and it's cool cuz at any time i could think of a new way to record the song, and it might work equally as well, or better, so i like that freedom. at the beginning i sort of had a problem with recording stuff on my tiny tape recorder, it was like, i thought if it was recorded, it was a final thing, (so therefore, it had to be done perfectly). but really, recording can be just a way to help you hear what you've got so far, and a version to have around for a while to listen to and think about what you want to change, and what you like about how it presents the song. so i'm glad i've figured that out, and i have soo many tapes of an audio notebook of stuff, where i record melodies or parts of songs, and then can go back to later and think about more.
the next melody i came up with was "doot doot doot" aka "bus 44/soon fall will be here" which i think i'm now calling "
no. 44" (as of yet, i think the album will be called "soon fall will be here".) i love this song so much, and i like this recording of it a lot, and this is the song which goes along with my etching i did, and i love how they complement each other, and how personal it is to me. the print is definitely a self portrait, and i guess most of my songs are self-portrait like, to some extent.
here's a random recording where i tried out the banjolin with fruity loops. haha. it's generally really hard to get fruity loops to do what i want. it's just so easy to get everything sounding super cheesy. but i have been playing around with it more and learning more about it, and it is sometimes an easy way to get something recorded, like a drum track or something.
i'm realizing how non-chronologically my songs have been written, just because the first ones i wrote were often just a few melody lines, and maybe some chords, and months later we went back and figured out other things, like new parts of songs, new chords, new lyrics, whatever the songs seemed to be calling for. so yeah, over the last year i haven't written too many new songs, we've mainly been trying to get my first songs to places where they could be considered ready to record or play live (which is two different things, sort of) but basically, just figuring out all the details, making decisions (which is a hard thing for me to do), trying to figure out what moods i want the songs to have, etc. sometimes it's felt like i've been stuck on a song, but over all, i have learned a lot from doing it, and i'm getting better at being able to come up with a melody for a new song, and thinking right then of what direction i want the song to go. which is pretty exciting, because i thought maybe that would never happen, and i'd be stuck with a ton of unfinished songs.
oh, and one more thing, for some reason, i'd always thought of music as something you had to grow up doing, so like, if i didn't have piano lessons since i was 6, i would never be good at music. but it's not true, i stumbled into songwriting at 19, and it was really exciting to find i had a new talent that i'd never known i'd had before. i'd taken guitar in my freshman year of high school (or maybe sophmore year?) and it was just for a few months (i was quite afraid to play or sing in front of my teacher) in that time, all i learned was making simple chords on guitar and some basic finger picking, and i had a beatles book, which is funny, cuz honestly, they're not really my top favorites at all, though i do like them, come on, they're the beatles.. but i didn't really understand why chords were the way they are. now that i know more about the piano, guitar makes some more sense to me, but i still don't really know how to play it or anything beyond regular chords and minor chords. my only other music playing was just cuz my grandparents had pianos, and we had my aunt's piano at our house (which she moved two weeks before i asked for lessons- haha), but i couldn't read music, and there was only one book i could sort of follow because it was "play by ear" and had weird charts drawn out of what notes to play. and sometimes i tried to pick out hymns and church songs by ear...cuz i knew them so well.
anyways, to be continued... i hope i'm not boring you all, and stay tuned for part three which will probably be about "read my heart" and "norway."
meow!
