Back at home, Monday. Following on from the shell-on-the-windowsill theme of the previous day with trinket on a shelf.
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A second song written and recorded while camping, my starting prompt was brittle.
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A continuation on the hailstones theme, written and recorded while camping in Marlo, which is a ridiculously gorgeous part of Victoria. I'm blaming the distraction of bird calls for my terrible attempt at bossa nova guitar. This one needs a little more practice.
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Hailstones was my starting prompt, but this was just a small snippet of text from some writing exercises that went on to inform the next day's song.
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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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These are the words from the previous day's random word selection exercise, strung together into nonsense, recorded right before I crashed onto the couch in my pyjamas for the rest of the evening.
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I started with the word draught from the previous piece, and then opened the book The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (highly recommended by the way) to random pages and chose the first word on the pages starting with each letter of draught. The words led me here, and I let myself just hit random keys on the piano for part of the accompaniment as I'd run out of energy to nut out something more functional.
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My starting prompt doorway led me to this ghost story, which formed the basis of my writing exercises. I eventually gave up trying to turn my scribblings into some kind of traditional song and just had fun with my effects pedals instead.
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The most song-like song of the week, on ukulele because it was easy to play curled up on the couch. My studio feels too much like work at the moment.
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Part III in a mini series, an actual dream. I've been having lots of bizarre ones lately, I think my imagination is on overdrive.
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Part II in a mini series. No wind this time, just lots of coffee.
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My three-month, one-season marker came and went without a blog post, and I've finally got through the backlog of stuff on my camera. I'm still finding this project incredibly difficult, and I think the madness present in the pieces of the past week speaks for state of mind right now. I am mainly struggling to sit down and write, and the inner critics in my head are shouting very loud. However, watching back over the last week of videos makes me realise it really doesn't matter what I create. I can make anything! I can let the slamming of a door be part of the project, as in this piece. Or my crazy dreams about a barnyard brawl (Filter (II)), or picking out random notes on the piano (New Year's Even Aquarium), or making strange noises with my voice through effects pedals (The Grey Lady), or simply stringing a bunch of nonsense words together (Up Glasses!). These pieces all felt like a last resort, when my creative anxiety wouldn't let me make anything else, but they are legitimate creative expressions that capture my mood and mindset.
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It's school holidays and my teaching load has lightened up, so I spent a leisurely amount of time on this song. I have found through this project that I often run out of steam half way through a composition, particularly when it comes to writing second verses of lyrics. All my best ideas from writing exercises usually end up in the first verse or section of lyrics, and then there is pressure for the second part to equal the first in quality, and also move the song along somehow. I find a more traditional pop song structure much harder to write in a day, but these less traditionally structured songs come much easier. I treated this one a little like a painting, with both verses adding new layers to the picture.
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I spent yesterday afternoon trying to sort out a pedal/instrument setup for my gig this Thursday night with Joyce Prescher and Kerryn Fields. While everything was plugged in I recorded this short little vocal piece, continuing with the autumnal theme of the previous piece. I love to cook, and I love the change in produce each new season brings. Autumn is probably my favourite time of year, and as the song says, I have been waiting for walnuts and chestnuts.
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Here's last night's piece, just a little acapella improvisation. My starting prompt for this one was gumboots and the text is the result of a 90 second writing exercise. As an aside, it's finally jumper weather in Melbourne, which makes me really happy. I love this time of year.
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My first song of April, and I decided to take flood as my theme from the previous day. I did quite a lot of writing exercises but they were all ending up very serious and depressing, and I didn't really feel in the mood for a serious or depressing song. I gave myself happy flood as a new prompt and ended up writing about the moment someone tells you they love you. Perhaps it's the cheerful and simple diatonic harmony, or the swing feel, or the repetition of the phrase "I love you", but it absolutely lifted my mood after the emotional ups and downs of the past week and the chaos of Friday's flood.
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On Friday afternoon I had just started recording the day's song when I heard a dripping sound from the hallway. My upstairs neighbours' flat was rapidly flooding, and as a consequence flooding down into my flat too. This is not the first time this has happened, so I knew exactly which areas of my apartment needed to be evacuated of stuff. I hauled everything out of the wardrobes and used every towel in the house to try and hold back the leaking water.
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This piece follows on from the previous day's Whisper mind map, and the word ear lobe that appeared on it. I did a three minute writing exercise using that prompt, and then took the nouns, verbs and adjectives from the result and paired them. Morning stirs and shake off the lamp light were the two pairs that prompted this piece. I tried to set the text to music without much success, so instead of getting frustrated I let myself record it as a spoken word piece.
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Thursday's piece. I continued on with the whisper theme and one of the words that appeared in my mind map was Will-'o-the-wisp, or a mysterious ghostly light that lures travellers from safe paths. Other words and concepts from the mind map also made it into the lyrics, including spider silk, secret, float and shout/cry.
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