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.

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.

Part II in a mini series.  No wind this time, just lots of coffee.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.  

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.

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.

Tuesday's piece, with a whisper following on from the hush of a lullaby.

I owe it to this project to be honest, and I am still struggling to find enjoyment in the writing process at the moment.  What I really want is time to sit down and work on some of the music I've already written, arranging and practicing it ready for gigs on April 9 and 16.  Instead my time and creative energy is going into writing new music, and I am procrastinating quite badly at the moment.

This is Sunday's piece, and I had regained a little of my mojo for this one.  I started with the theme clumsy from the previous day's piece, and did a three minute timed writing exercise.  I then took all the nouns, verbs and adjectives from the result of that writing exercise and created word pairs with them.  I used two of the pairs, "somewhere rain" and "another kitchen", as prompts for two additional three-minute writing exercises, and the results of those exercises led to this song.  The day after I wrote this song it actually did rain in Melbourne, so I like to think I summoned the rain with my song.

Saturday's piece, a very quick improvisation before I took the night off.  Just one take with both the text and melody improvised in the moment.

This is the piece that gave me so much trouble over the weekend (see #73).  I did set it aside for a little bit of time, but once I was in a better headspace I forced myself to finish it.  Like piece 73, ink was my starting point.

My last post was Thursday, which seems like an eternity ago as the last few days have been really difficult.  This project was never meant to be easy, although up to now it has never felt impossible, and I've generally kept to my deadlines and retained my confidence in my ability to churn out new music when required.  Over the weekend, however, I fell apart and spent a large part of it paralysed by anxiety.  My rational brain knew that if I could just sit down and do the work I would end up with something, but when I tried I was unable to concentrate and found the anxiety expressing itself in physical symptoms, which is something I haven't really experienced before.

This one is Wednesday's, my starting point was ink from the previous day's piece.  I had very little time to spare, so it's just a quick improvisation on a small lyrical idea.  I borrowed a little bit of descending whole tone melody from the previous day's piece too.

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.

The calendar says autumn but the weather says summer, summer, summer.  Indeed.  It was over 30 degrees and humid yesterday in Melbourne, so I wrote about that.  I feel like a broken record complaining about the weather, but I've never really had to really push through creative work in uncomfortable environments before.  In the past I would have just taken a break for the day and gone to find somewhere cool to hang out, but there are songs to be written, so I might as well mine the discomfort for ideas.