SCP #52: Butter Yellow

My first song of March.  I'm writing this post from the library in air-conditioned comfort, taking a break from my hot and stuffy apartment.  It might be autumn here in Melbourne now, but summer is still holding on.  I uploaded this video from the library too, and was prepared with my songwriting notebook, water bottle and knitting to keep me occupied while I waited for it to upload.  Except it took less than a minute to complete, so I lugged all that stuff down here for nothing.  It seems slightly ridiculous, as a video of this length takes approximately two hours to upload on my home internet connection.  I definitely think I'll be spending a lot more time in the library this year.

For this piece I took the theme custard from the previous day, and created a mind map of related words.  One of the most interesting things to do with a mind map is to join up the outer branches, linking otherwise unrelated ideas.  The two themes I pulled from my mind map's outer branches were butter yellow and dinner party crack.  That's crack as in a fracture, not the illicit substance, although that also could have yielded some interesting results.  I did a two minute writing exercise for each theme, and the idea of running into an old love at a dinner party emerged.  One of my favourite authors is Madeleine St John, who wrote a trio of loosely related novels set in middle-class London.  I have read these books multiple times, and I had them in my mind while working on this song.

Harmonically I took the prominent notes from the previous piece and assigned them numbers, then, as there were six notes, I rolled two dice to create pairs of notes.  I made six note pairs, but only ended up using two for the final piece.  I arranged the idea for solo voice.  It's my first experiment with guitar effect pedals on my voice, and it was really fun.