The second of my glove mind map improvisation experiments.
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In my chat with Lucy Roleff for Mind Over Myth we talked about being addicted to newness. When I was young my favourite Barbie doll was always the newest one I'd acquired. I adored that newest doll, dressed it in all the best outfits, devoted hours to creating stories and scenes for it to play in, and then discarded it on the next birthday or Christmas when a new one arrived to take its place.
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From Thursday 13th, the starting prompt was lace curtains.
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Not many words today, just a backlog of songs. From Wednesday 12th, the starting prompt was nonsense.
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This is Tuesday's song, continuing the fingerprint theme. Fingerprints look a lot like topographic map markings, which was the inspiration for this one. I did a little fingers-in-random-places on my ukulele to find ideas for the harmony.
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Yesterday I was going through my videos of the past few weeks, putting them onto a USB to give to my partner's parents, and it forced me to sit back and evaluate just how productive I've been. There are a few songs I've written that have stuck in my consciousness for days or weeks after I'm done recording them, however most get forgotten as I turn my mind to the next day's work. Going back through them made me proud of not only the sheer quantity of my output, but also the quality of many of the ideas. It is not helpful to dwell on either the successes or failures of this project, however a look back through my work has given me a boost of confidence that will hopefully help me push through the dark and difficult patches that are becoming more and more frequent.
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Two months of songs down, and it took me all this time to do something on ukulele. I have never really enjoyed playing uke, as I find it uncomfortable to hold, and just use it for teaching. But yesterday I finally went and got a strap button installed, and it made such a difference. While I was studying at the VCA Jo Lawry gave a master class, and spoke about the advantages of writing songs on an unfamiliar instrument. For her it was guitar, and she enjoyed just putting her fingers onto the instrument and letting sounds guide her. The ukulele plays a similar role for me, as I find its tuning very foreign. This song came about from simply putting my fingers in random places on the instrument and letting my ear be my guide.
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This piece is not what I was originally working on yesterday. I had planned out a whole story-song and done lots of timed writing exercises to generate material to work with, but by the time I got that far it was after 11pm and I was exhausted. I looked up from my piano and into the mirror and my eyes were red and watery, so instead of pushing through I changed tact and did something much simpler.
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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.
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I don't feel I have much to say today, as I'm pretty exhausted. I still have to go and write today's song, so I'll go get to work and let yesterday's music do the talking.
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This piece marks the end of week seven. At some point I stopped actively counting the days as they click past, so realising I've been at this for seven weeks is a bit of a shock. By the end of next week I'll have finished my third month, and one whole season of songs. These daily videos are not just a record of my creative output, but also a record of a year in my life going by, which is quite nice. We are coming to the end of Melbourne summer, so as the days become shorter and cooler I am sure my songs will adapt to the new season just as much as my wardrobe will. Despite fluctuations in energy and enthusiasm for the project my body and mind show no signs of quitting, so I really hope I can make through all four seasons of songs.
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I'm coming to the end of the third week into my full teaching schedule, and I'm starting to feel a little burnt out. When I don't have a lot of time for working on the day's piece I fall into tried and tested habits and processes, and while I'm in the composition process my inner voices are telling me that the music is becoming routine and uninteresting as a result. Many of the processes help me turn off those inner voices, but perhaps as I get better at using the processes the voices get better at finding their way through my defences. I think the answer is to keep introducing new processes and composition exercises, to keep my brain distracted from self criticism.
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One of the songwriting tools I use regularly is an etymological dictionary. Looking at the origin of words is a really fascinating way of finding links between seemingly unrelated objects and ideas. My original starting point for this piece was umbrella, and the origin of that word comes from umbra, which is related to shadows and also to phantoms and ghosts. It is an interesting coincidence that the words shade and umbrella are linked, as shade also appeared in the previous day's piece. I took the ghostly route, and worked off the idea of trying to imagine a loved one back into existence.
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One of the reasons I started this project was to give myself permission to create whatever kind of music that day inspired. After releasing my debut album Twelve Moons last year I spent a lot of time struggling to categorise the music I liked to make, and trying to fit it into predefined genre boxes (folk? jazz? experimental?) that it was never quite the right shape for.
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I composed and recorded this one after having a wonderful chat with an old friend of mine for next week's episode of Mind Over Myth (which is now available for you to subscribe to on iTunes). He stayed for dinner, so once again I was chipping away at my daily song late at night. Since transitioning to a career as a musician and music teacher I have struggled with the change in schedule. Unlike my old 9 - 5 jobs, I do the bulk of my work in the late afternoons and evenings. The habit of many years' relaxing in the evenings is a hard one to break, and I feel strange and guilty if I sit down in the morning or early afternoon to watch a film, knit or sew, or just do something mind numbing for a few hours. All the late-night songwriting is taking its toll, however, and I realise I really do need some downtime. I spent a few hours before lunch today watching Vice documentaries, and there was one about Romanian witches that stuck in my mind. In particular, it was the idea of the witches tearing open the sky to read the future that really struck me.
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Apparently I'm 9.5% of the way through this project, which doesn't seem very far at all. I already feel that my process is becoming stale, so I introduced some rigorous serial composition into today's piece to shift me away from habit. I took the words ruby and secret from yesterday's title and used them as the basis for the composition.
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This one was recorded at about 1:30am, which is by far the latest I've stayed up writing and recording for this project so far. At about midnight when it was only half done I crashed, and was almost asleep at the piano. I didn't like the melody, I had holes in my lines of lyrics that I just couldn't fill, and I was annoyed that I hadn't captured the mood from my initial writing exercises either musically or lyrically. Basically, my inner critic was telling me everything was crap, and that I should just scrap it all and start again.
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So far the most reliable source of inspiration for this project has been folklore. I'm not sure if it's because I feel comfortable working in that kind of lyrical and thematic realm, or if it's just what I'm interested in right now, but I turned there again for today's piece. I started with the word skin from yesterday, and the first Google search result for "skin folklore" was selkie, which proved a fertile place to start.
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This piece continues on with yesterday's citrus theme, but used oranges instead of lemons as a prompt. I took the melody from yesterday's improvisation and turned it into a chord, and then transposed it into a nicer key for mandolin.
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