SCP #57: Hummingbird

When I started this project back in January I was still sailing along on the time-rich bliss of summer school holidays. I had a great routine of waking up, practicing mandolin or guitar with coffee, doing some exercise while listening to a podcast, showering, practicing some more before and after lunch, then working on my daily song in the evening. But then the school term and private teaching started up again and my routine got thrown into turbulence and I haven't been able to steady it since.

SCP #53: Library Ladder

I hadn't realised it, but somewhere along this project I stopped judging my work and just got down to the business of doing it. For some reason my judgement was turned back on for this piece, which is why I realised it hadn't been there for the past few weeks. Despite recent complaints about the heat and lack of emotional and physical energy, all those songs felt like a breeze to work on compared to this one.

SCP #50: The Sentence Is Not Finished

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.

SCP #38: The First Train Home

This piece is improvised, following on from yesterday's themes of transport and rain. Yesterday it was a car, today a train. I wrote the text first, then freely improvised with it and recorded only one take. While I like spending time crafting and perfecting a piece of music, I also love improvising freely, and there is something particularly interesting about the very first performance of an idea. My composition process involves recording improvisations like this and then listening back to them for ideas to expand upon, but those improvisations rarely make it past a voice memo on my phone. This project gives them a reason to exist as compositions in their own right, and I am excited to develop this part of my practice as the year progresses.

SCP #34: Ruby Secrets

It's summer in Melbourne, and even though it wasn't particularly hot today my flat just won't cool down. I don't like to play or practice with the windows open for the sake of our neighbours, so spending time locked in a small room with no airflow has been particularly uncomfortable the last couple of days. I got about half an hour of guitar scales in today before I'd had enough, so I kept today's piece very simple.

SCP #30: Counting The Trains

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.

SCP #27: Orange Peels

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.

SCP #26: Lemon

I won't write too much tonight, instead I'll direct you over to Rehearsal Magazine, who have just published an interview I did with them this week. I will say that today life took over, and I was left with only a small window of time for today's composition. That window didn't coincide with my feeling particularly creative or inspired, so I forced myself through a few 90 second lyric writing exercises and then improvised with results.

SCP #24: Sun-Pearl

Good morning! Here's a belated post for yesterday's song. I feel like I need to prove somehow that I did write and record it yesterday, but you'll just have to take my word for it. I didn't finish getting the video ready until well after 1am last night, so I pressed upload and went to bed. I had to re-watch it this morning to remember what I had done, and discovered there is some grammatical weirdness at the end of the lyrics that is going to irritate me all day. I had been wrestling with the end of the lyrics for a while, and in the end I called time and just went with what I had. I'm glad I didn't just leave out the second verse completely, as I now have a rough draft that I can polish up.

SCP #20: Wild Daisy

My friend Emilee Seymour (who is a wonderful multi-disciplinary artist) told me in an email the other day she was intrigued by the writing exercises I've mentioned a few times in this blog, so I thought I'd use that as an excuse to talk about them in a little more detail today. First, my connection to yesterday comes by way of dandelions, which are part of the daisy family. I dipped into the Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore and the Occult Sciences again, which told me "it is very unlucky to transplant wild daisies into a cultivated garden". Using this idea of trying to tame a wild daisy I conducted two three-minute writing exercises, the first prompted by wild daisy and the second by cultivated daisy.

SCP #18: Fig Tree Slumber

I worked out today that I have been writing songs for about fifteen years, which sounds like an amazingly long time, and I feel I should be much better at it than I am by now. One chunk of that fifteen year period was plagued with horrible writers' block, which was largely due to not knowing how to write about things that were not highly and specifically personal. Learning how to separate myself from the songs and treat them more like works of fiction really helped me to get past that period, and now my writing tends to draw as much from my imagination as it does my own life experiences. Opening up space for my imagination means I can turn to books, films, mythology, poetry or art for stories and ideas, without having to wait for something in my own life to throw me a spark of inspiration.

SCP #17: Briar Rose

I dived a little way back in to my secret past with today's piece. My music degree was my fourth attempt at tertiary study, and the only degree I managed to complete. When I was much younger I studied almost all of a textile design diploma, but gave it up because it was destroying my love of making things. I'm not sure why studying music didn't do the same, perhaps just because I was older and more sure of my path.

SCP #16: Spin Me Like A Top

I have been binge-listening to a couple of really fantastic music-related podcasts recently. The first is Susan De Weger's Beyond the Stage, which explores the way music training can enhance careers beyond the traditional performance-based options that are becoming increasingly rare. The second is Ben Turner's Double Depresso, which explores mental health in the arts. I happen to be meeting up with Ben tomorrow morning to have a chat for a future episode, but the interview I listened to this morning with musician-turned-psychologist Fran felt particularly relevant to this project. There was a lot of chat about the perils of social media, in particular the addictive nature of the "like" culture. So far I've settled into a fairly robust writing routine, however the public nature of the project is not something I have quite figured out yet. I spoke a little in a previous post about it giving me an audience to feel accountable to and help keep me on track with my daily deadline, but I didn't really address the darker side.

SCP #15: Nyx

Week three begins, and I started today refreshed and ready to write again. The last few days had left me feeling quite stale, so I decided I needed to introduce some fresh creative material into my process. From yesterday I took the idea of the night, and did some quick and dirty Google research into night-related mythology. I was intrigued by Nyx, the Goddess of the night, and so I used her as the basis for this piece. In particular I was interested in the ways she might bring on the night, by physically casting a veil of darkness over the sky.

SCP #13: Clocks, Coffee

I'm writing this post a day late, although I did stick to my project rules and write and record this piece yesterday. I got it done right before I drove out to the beautiful Yarra Valley to play at a Bright Young Music wedding, and it definitely challenged my time management. I decided that the gig preparation took precedence, and that I would get all of that done first and use whatever remaining time I had left on this song, which was about half an hour. If I didn't have this self-imposed daily deadline I wouldn't have completed it, as the day of a large gig always comes with heightened stress levels. Of course the deadline is self-imposed, so I'd only be letting myself down if I took the day off, yet the public nature of this project means that I am also accountable to an audience.

Song-Chain Project, Clocks & Time, CoffeeErica Bramham21 January 2017mandolin, voice, critique, judgement, lyrical

SCP #12: In This Room

Today is the first day I really didn't want to sit down and work. Really, really didn't want to. My schedule has been fairly light the past few weeks as most of my music teaching doesn't resume until the school term starts back again, but I am playing at a wedding tomorrow and spent most of today preparing for that. I had considered building rest days into this project - one day a month perhaps - but momentum is an easy thing to lose. One day off the wagon and you start to want another, and another and another. I have no idea when I'll fit tomorrow's song in, but that's a challenge for the morning.

SCP #10: The End Of A Feeling

I don't have a lot of brain space left tonight, but I'll do my best to bash out a few cohesive thoughts on this piece. Today was an exercise in learning that something is enough. This one is not very long, and there was far more I was playing around with, but it got to 11:30pm and I decided to just record the most cohesive part. I tried to treat it like a finished piece in performance, and just making that mental decision seemed to help solidify it as a composition that is complete in itself regardless of what it wanted to be originally

SCP #9: The Taste Of A Stammer

Today's contribution starts to stretch the definition of music a little, but it falls within my use of the term. This was a purely lyrical endeavour, and came from the line "tripping through streets in insensible shoes" from yesterday, which I found myself turning around in my head long after I'd finished the recording. I decided to take the dominant sounds of that line, S's and T's, as my starting point. After brainstorming a whole lot of words that featured those sounds I put them together into random sentences, and the one I really liked the sound of was "the taste of a stammer". I used that as the starting point for a narrative, and fleshed out the text with other words from my brainstormed list, weaving them together in ways I liked both alliteratively and narratively

SCP #7: The Sun Makes It Grow From Your Feet

Today marks the end of the very first week of this project, and perhaps the end of the honeymoon period, as it's getting difficult now. It's a little surreal to realise I've churned out seven new musical ideas in as many days, and terrifying to realise I still have to find another 358 to make it to the end of the year.

SCP #5: Swing-Song

I have a young guitar student who is incredibly cute, and likes to take off his shoes before he starts his lesson. He says he's "just not comfortable" until he does. He always informs me while removing his footwear that he has tan-bark in his socks, and he inspired some of the lyrics for this piece

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