Tuesday 30th

The editor tells me it's October 30th already, which surprised me because I thought it was like the 20th or something. Seemingly, time has been standing still in my head for nearly a fortnight. Oh well, the joys of living outside a calendar.

Voice has nearly returned (nearly). New tune progresses. We now have a completed first verse and what I thought was a bridge but might be a chorus getting overly excited and jumping in early. Writing songs for me is a bit like building a track for toy trains. Sometimes I know the basic shape I want but don't know how to make it from the bits I want, other times I don't know what the shape'll be but I know it needs to reach from the sofa to the pouffe. In this song, I'm just trying to put one piece in front of the other and see what happens. So far, I really like the route it's travelling. Fuck knows where it's going next though. I just know it needs more drums! Lots, lots more!

I was thinking just now, whilst downstairs fiddling around with my array of pedals, about something a friend once said to me. He told me that there is Girl Music and there is Boy Music, and that neither can be appreciated by the other gender. Well, clearly, that's total bollocks but I recognise that some artists get a very male dominated crowd and some have the opposite. I began to wonder what mine would be like. I hope it would appeal to those people, like myself, who live on the borders between my friend's rigid gender stereotypes - girls who hate pink but enjoy eyeliner, for example, or boys who like beer but not football. Maybe I'll write our alternation an anthem one day.

Sunday 28th

I came down with the nasty virus that I'd been congratulating myself on avoiding whilst all around my dropped like flies on the ferry on the way to Amsterdam two days before my birthday. Two weeks later, and my voice is still not back on form. Very frustrating. However, it means that I get to write an entire instrumental and then see what vocals happen, rather than building the song around the vox like I usually do. SO, bearing that in mind, I've started a new track, rather than completing Burn (which mostly needs a whole new load of vocal takes before I can work out what's missing).

As I decided to start a new track, yesterday was incredibly frustrating (starting a new piece almost always is), and began with a music box, went through volcanoes and church choirs, and came out at organs, a a nifty little drum pattern and one of my favourite instruments of all time - the celeste. Incredibly expensive if you want an orchestral one (Yamaha released their own line a while back retailing at about 14,000 if you believe their site prices) but ridiculously inexpensive if you realise that a child's toy piano is basically a little celeste made cheaply and for tiny fingers. Fortunately, my fingers are miniscule and spindly, so toy pianos play just fine for me. Boyfriend and I picked up the one I bought on ebay in manchester (having allowed Boyfriend to navigate, so we were over 5 hours late) from an elderly old woman. She asked us how old our little girl was, and Boyfriend, rather than lying like I hoped he would, told her I was a musician. Her face crumpled. "Like a rock band?" she said. I shook my head and attempted to fix the situation, but she'd already turned to her greying son and said "See? I told you we never should have sold it". I still feel a bit guilty.

Boyfriend thinks it's the creepiest thing he's ever heard, thanks to it being ever so slightly out of tune on a couple of notes. He reckons any child forced to play one of these things would run screaming.

I love it.

Saturday 27th

My fingers hurt. I've been programming my music box today and the punch you have to use on it is stiff so after a couple of hours, they've started to really feel it. Damn these ridiculously weak fingers of mine. I've always said that for me guitar playing is a martial art - use the guitar's own strength against it instead of trying to conjure up any of my own. People generally look puzzled.

Tricky part is I have to programme it deaf, if you like, because I can't hear how anything I've programmed sounds until after I've done the whole thing and run it through the mechanism. So I'm pretending to be Beethoven writing the 9th.

Friday 26th

I return to you officially older having had a truly extended birthday fortnight. Mother went home yesterday, and I spent most of the rest of the day sitting, reading trashy magazines and watching Frasier. This morning I woke up feeling truly euphoric, focused and craving literature. I've just ordered a bunch of mythology (my library that I built up throughout my childhood was left behind when I left home, and I'm finally getting to the point of replacing it) and I feel the urge to be in a bookshop or a library. Maybe both. I think I'll be headed that way this afternoon, and then onwards into my little music box this evening, to see what appears.

Friday 12th

It's all

gone

a bit

nineties.

Thursday 11th

The full structure is now in place. It went somewhere I wasn't expecting at all. All because of a hilarious misunderstanding with my microkorg. Damn "b" button. Catching me unawares. The tracks is, and will be once completed, 4:02 long (that's minutes and seconds, in case you were worrying). I have a list of things to do, which i would paste up here, but they're excessively boring. In fact, point editing volume is SO boring, I occasionally spend a little time making the volumes into pictures instead of doing what i'm supposed to (which will make no sense to people who havent edited audio digitally, but for those that have: I mostly just make my tracks smile, but one day I might work out how to do a train).

The track's name is Burn. I like it. It has a seriously cool interlude.

I reckon one, maybe two, more day(')s(') (<- for all you grammar nazis) work and it'll be done. And most of that will just be retaking all the vocals (I put down guide vocals at the start of the project just quicky so I could keep track of what I was doing, and they're not that good) and fixing a couple of slight errors in timing.

And after that, the track listing will read:

Mary
Can't Be Won't Be
Delay
Burn
Power Cut 84
Blank Space
These Are My Catechisms
Suburban Paranoia

It's getting long. :D

Tuesday 9th

And here I am yet again in the early hours of the morning, updating you while I listen back to what I'm doing. But there is a great and beneficial change today! Oh yes! I am also eating soup. Multi-task to the max!

Don't worry, I'm not whinging about being up this late. I'm just at that "if I stop doing this, I'll forget all my ideas and I'll never finish it properly" stage, so i can't really leave it, and I dont actually want to either. Started recording The Great Destroyer today. The name may change... they usually do. I once saw Kings of Convenience (kind of by accident - I had no idea who they were - turned out to be one of the best gigs I've ever seen) and they said they deliberately come up with obtuse song names whenever possible. The idea kind of appeals.

Anyway, I got the drum pattern down (or one of them... I feel this will have several) and then spent 5 hours (I'm not kidding) unsuccessfully playing the song's gregorian riff (yes, a gregorian riff. It's a thing). I'm not totally incapable, honest. It's just that the riff's harmonised to fuck with a pedal and the original input signal is turned off, and I couldn't remember the original notes. So, after five hours, I realised I'd saved it on my loop pedal while I was writing the damn thing, and could just have sampled it from that. Stupid stupid Leni. Or clever. Whatever.

So, there followed vocal takes for another 4 hours or so, and now I'm getting down into the serious Production part of the song writing process. So far, I've deleted half of what I had and put in pizzicato double bass. Means I'm getting somewhere.

Sunday 7th

I love Radio 4. Not all the time, I grant you, although, thanks to the combination of the joys of daytime programming mixed and a very long first year, I did, for a while, know the correct way to cure my own lamb after slaughter. I love listening to Saturday review and hearing people discuss things that sometimes it seems like only I'm interested in. If I lived anywhere near London, I reckon all my money and time would be spent on going to whatever they recommended each week. :s

Speaking of, my weekend plans got cancelled. Partner in crime is sick, as I discovered at half one last night. Part of me was a bit relieved - given that I was still awake at half one (yes, i worked late last night. Told you it'd be a long day) and needed to be up at 7 to catch the train. Part of me is sad to be so far away from the Rothko room today. I have this yearning to go and sit in it and write lyrics and read my Sandmans (Sandmen?).

On a genuine plus side, I have worked on the new stuff a lot today (having gotten up well into midmorning to pay my body back for the ridiculously little and irregular rest I've been giving it), and the new track is currently at 3 mins 22. I genuinely thought it was a lot shorter. Like, under two minutes. Guess this is what happens when you pull everything back to 96.8 bpm. It still needs something that I can't quite put my finger on, but as I've only been jamming it downstairs with the loop pedal and my drum/synth machine, I figure it might just be recording, production and some actual frigging instruments.

On a totally different note, this bemused and baffled me this evening, so I thought I'd share:

Juggling For Jesus

Who wouldn't instantly think "yes, I can juggle, but how can I use my routines to tell the gospels?"??

The world is a strange place.

Pee es:

Just because Michael Moschen is a fucking genius:

Take 10 minutes

Saturday 6th

Right. After many many many hours of fiddling (not literally - my violin playing is utterly abysmal STILL. I swear I'll get round to learning her and the cello soon!), we have a beginning. And a chorus! A chorus of all things! I've sort of appropriated lyrics from one of the songs I started last night (actually, the one I got most of the way with is the one I'm stealing the lyrics from for the one I barely did anything with and whose riff was just there suddenly, like a fox in a car park) so they've KIND OF melded together. Except for instrumentation. And melody. And pretty much everything.

Hopefully I'll get some time to continue working on her before Monday. We'll see. Got to be up in six hours. Shouldn't have played so long.

Oh, and for all you synaesthetes out there, this new track is brown. Not ugly brown - earthy brown. Like a really good jumper. With fuzzy bits and little strands of other random colours woven in. I see all music as colours. Here's a quick run down of the album so far so you can ompare colours for yourselves:

Mary - main part of the song is yellow, little bit of green, little bit of blue. The ending is red and blue and orange. It sounds awful, but I swear it kinda works, pollock style.

Delay - is dark blue, indigo, deep purple and cerise. With a couple of splashes of gold and silver. Like a slightly wounded sky. It's the one I'm least visually certain about as it stands.

Catechisms - is green, black and brown. Occasional tipex blotches.

Blank Space - is almost entirely green (which was the aim - i started it wanting to write a green track), little bit of pale cerulean.

Can't be wont be - is reddish brown and red, with yellow streaks from the violins.

Power Cut - is very blue and silver and green. Gosh, there's a lot of green in this record. I hadn't really noticed. Power Cut is dark, like a brightly painted room at night with the lights off and the curtains open, just lit by the hall light fro the doorway and the streetlamp outside.

Suburban Paranoia - is grey, again in half light, with orange.

The version of Harpy I'm working on producing is shaded like a bumble bee. It's always been yellow, but it's never been this corn coloured before. It was kinda lemony. Living With Ghosts is pink, which is really putting me off working on it.

Friday 5th

Why are songs like buses?

Obviously, because just when you've given up hope of ever writing another one, two come along at once. At one o clock in the morning, 24 hours before your life is booked up for three days straight. Sigh. Today is going to be one hell of a long shift.

Monday 1st

Well, September wasn't as successful as August by any means. Yes, a new song was written, but the recording hit some severe problems and now the whole thing's back on the drawing board for a while. And I was severely depressed for about two weeks at the beginning of the month, which was time basically just written off. Having recovered, I'm hoping that's it for the rest of the year, and am looking forward to the up payoff somewhere around the end of November.

Four of the seven (seven!) completed songs have been mixed down, myspaced and handed to Huw Stephens and are therefore Out There. An odd thought.

Goals for this month include:

Production of previously written songs, starting with Harpy, possibly followed by Living With Ghosts, Arsenic or even Fight What You Know.

Completion of current vague ideas, including weird ass mbira shit (seriously guys - plug one of those things into a GT8 and see what happens), throbbing guitar idea and creepy kit drums. Yes, the ideas really are THAT vague.

I am slightly held back in October due to it being My Birthday, as well as Birthday of Boyfriend (which practically coincide. I'm sure a long term relationship between two indecisive/overly-decisive Libras can't be a good idea) and hence am losing about a week and a half to Birthday, Birthday-Of-Boyfriend, Birthday-With-Best-Friend and Birthday-With-Mother, all of which are different events.

In other news, I'm sleeping really badly again lately. Last night, I dreamt that men broke into my house. I came home in the middle of it all and called the police, so they didnt get hold of my precious mac and therefore I didn't lose all my work, but they DID steal my piano. For those of you who don't know me, that's essentially the same as my world collapsing. The dream went on as I fought my way through my living room, in which not only did I have my upright, but there was the one my mother has in her home (which is actually mine), my electric grand (which had been turned to face the wall) and my old harpsichord (which I sold recently so as to buy my drum machines, and because it was buggered beyond my ability to fix it). In amongst these keyboard instruments were pieces of a grand piano. For a moment I thought the bastards had broken up my baby into little pieces and left her for me to find, but as Boyfriend (who'd appeared at this point with no explanation, as happens in dreams) began to rebuild it I realised they'd replaced my beautiful Yamaha with a Petrof. Boyfriend said it was the same. It's a piano, isn't it? It's not the same.

Yes, I'm even a piano geek in my dreams.

Speaking of, I've been staying up later than I should because of her. When I feel very sleepy, instead of crawling into bed, I crawl up onto my piano stool and we talk for hours. Thank goodness this house is pretty much soundproofed (again). Last night we played Brick by Ben Folds, Message To My Girl by Neil Finn (transcribed by moi circa 2002), A Cover (which I wrote a couple of years ago as a mantra to get me through a gig I really didn't want to play), amongst other things. It was like the piano was pulling out all these people from my past and letting me look at them properly while we played. She knows what I need sometimes. It's a shame I don't know when sleep is more important.

I saw Copying Beethoven on Saturday at local indie cinema, which happens to be based at the moment in the University union building. I didn't think it was very good as a film, though it had interesting things to say about the nature of musicianship. Watching the actors in the chorus of the ninth, I began thinking about those who perform these interesting roles in life and are totally lost to history. i wonder whether the descendants of these people know of their little triumphs, or whether it is all really forgotten, whilst pieces of themselves walk around across the earth. Those related to the truly famous seem very proud of the fact. i just wonder what sets the famous apart from those who helped them achieve said fame. My grandfather is particularly proud of his minorly famous (our minorly-famous) ancestor, the admiral who took command of the fleets after Nelson's death. I ran into a portrait of him unexpectedly once in the reconstructed marina in Hartlepool. Hardly a story, but there is our claim.

I left the cinema around 11ish and found myself in the midst of the uni's fresher's party. I wandered around briefly bemusedly watching the not-yet-grown-ups put on those aspects they believe make them likeable and wander round in their chosen costumes, unaware of their masks, or costumes, or futures, I suppose. I found the entire thing vaguely bizarre, strangely disconcerting and extremely funny. I also felt very old.