SCP #46: The Shade

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.

SCP #45: Two Shades Of Blue

I delved into my experimental self for this piece, but unfortunately my audio recorder didn't pick up much of the water sounds. I was pretty exhausted yesterday, and so I allocated myself a half hour window in which to get the piece done. I used ink from the previous day as a starting theme, and a mind map led me to cobalt blue. Some internet wandering brought up Renoir's painting The Umbrellas, which was painted using two different shades of blue: the first stages of the painting done using cobalt, and later stages with ultramarine. This idea of an umbrella in two shades of blue inspired the text, and my kitchen provided the props.

SCP #43: Read My Heart

For this piece I took a fragment of yesterday's melody, wrote the notes on scraps of paper and pulled them out of a hat to create a new melody. The first time I pulled them out, however, they were in perfect ascending scale order, so I discarded that melodic idea. If I were really giving myself over to randomness I should have gone with that first attempt, but I found the orderliness uninspiring so I had another go. Really, I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to make something interesting out of half a scale, and I didn't even give myself the chance to try. Next time I'll stick to my guns, and work with whatever material my methods throw up.

SCP #42: Some Kind Of Crazy Novelist

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.

SCP #41: Cocoon

Friday's deadline failure has made me realise that 2am bed times for the rest of the year are just not sustainable, especially when I am teaching at 8:30 or 9am the following day. I have generally been good at actually writing and recording the day's song before midnight (or at worst before 1am), but I don't feel my task is complete until I edit the video, upload it, write the day's blog post and then share it across my social media platforms.

SCP #40: Moth

I could fib, and tell you that I recorded this yesterday and just didn't have time to upload it, but that's not really in the spirit of this project. So no, I didn't record this yesterday. I didn't even finish writing it yesterday. I had the guitar part and half the lyrics done, and then I fell asleep, exhausted, on the couch with a pencil in my hand while trying to work on the second half of the words. I gave in, and went to bed, I woke this morning refreshed but very annoyed that I hadn't just recorded what I had, instead of labouring over it when my mind had clearly switched off for the day.

SCP #39: Nothing To Be Wished Upon

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.

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 #36: A Pin On A Map

I have two younger sisters, and we are close in age and in friendship. My middle sister moved to New York last year, and although the internet makes it easy for us to send little messages back and forth throughout our respective days, it's not the same as having her here in Melbourne. I worked with the theme of distance from yesterday's piece, and wrote this for her. Recording it made me a little emotional, because I miss her, and reminds me of the power music has to move and change us, and make us think. Songwriting, for me it seems, is a balancing act between keeping unhelpful emotions out of the process, while allowing helpful emotions to flow freely through the composition and the performance.

SCP #35: A Love, Sweet And Secret

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.

SCP #32: Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers

Today marks the first day of month two of this year-long project. I should probably write a bit of a reflection on month one, but I might do that as a separate post tomorrow when I have a some free time. Today I'll keep my writing about my composition, and I might get a little nerdy in today's post. If you're one of my non-musician friends you might want to skip through to the bit about the lyrics.

SCP #31: Popcorn

Today marks the end of my first month of songs and I can't quite believe I've produced 31 new pieces of music in as many days. I can barely remember what I did last week, let alone the first week of this project. I think my next task has to be to book a gig, so that I have an excuse to workshop some of these songs to completion.

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 #29: Selkie

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.

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 #25: Don't Say It

One of the things you learn while studying jazz is how to be complicated. Every time I write something simple I have this voice in the back of my mind telling me it's not good enough because it's not full of crazy chords or in some kind of weird time signature. It's a ridiculous mindset, as there is plenty of beauty and skill in composing simply, but I really have to work hard to convince myself of that when I'm in the middle of writing and my inner critic is judging like mad.

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 #21: The Sea

Week three down, only 49 to go. The end is nowhere in sight, but I'm still mostly enjoying myself. Yesterday was a first for me in terms of improvising on guitar and voice at the same time, today's piece is a first in that I've never really used my loop pedal with a guitar before, only with my voice. Each of these daily compositions give me a chance to try out new ideas, but they also give me a chance to struggle at actually performing them without much practice.

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.

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