SCP #19: Dandelion

There are several recurring themes that are emerging in these pieces, and one is clocks. I don't know why I'm so obsessed with clocks, but they seem to be right at the top of my unconscious mind all the time and keep springing into my writing. This morning while I was teaching a singing student the clock in my studio fell to the floor and smashed. This was completely down to my inappropriate choice of 3M Hook size, yet it still felt somewhat significant. Perhaps the clocks in my house are sick of me writing about them? Or maybe they are crying out for attention in our age of digital devices with time-keeping capabilities. Either way, I chose clocks as a starting point for today, which led me to memories of "dandelion clocks" from childhood - when you would count the number of puffs it would take to empty the flower of its feathers and that would tell you the time

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 #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 #14: Waiting...

Today marks the end of week two, and I'm feeling awfully burnt out already. I'm mentally, physically and vocally exhausted from a six hour gig yesterday, and all I wanted today was to have a day off. I have to be kind to myself though. This project was never going to be easy, and will ebb and flow with my mental and physical energy levels, and it's something I have to learn to work with.

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 #8: You And Her

Day 8, and I still haven't quite got my inner critic under control. It sneaks up on me in the middle of experimenting with an idea and tells me it isn't good enough. Or it's not "me" enough. Or it's too much like something else I've written. Or it's just not very interesting. There's a very strong personal element that comes into play too, the idea isn't good, original or interesting enough and therefore you as a person aren't either. If you let them take over, these feelings can stop any kind of creative progress in its tracks.

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

SCP #4: Hard Heart, Soft Hands

I felt like playing some mandolin today. From yesterday I took the idea of a square, which has four sides, and played around with intervals of a fourth to find the simple accompaniment pattern. Phrasing that same melody in groups of five over the top creates a nice bit of tension that eventually resolves. It's quite refreshing where such a small idea can lead, and although the result is very simple I can hear all kinds of possibilities for expanding it and arranging it for an ensemble.

SCP #1: The Number Of Petals My Heart Has Left

The tyranny of the blank page...

It turns out there was a fatal flaw in my plan for this project: I didn't have any kind of starting point for the very first song. I'm naturally an excellent procrastinator if given the chance, and I almost decided that my announcement of the project would count as today's work. But I made a late dash to the finish line after dinner and emerged triumphant.

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