how I 'fixed' my chorus and then ate blueberry muffins
in my previous post I previewed a new song and now I'd like to share versions of the chorus
When “Night Pyramid” was still called “Last Scan”, this was what followed the 1st verse:
And for a year that’s how it stayed. I knew it wasn’t a chorus, but thought with the right flourishes, right texture, some hawt lyrics, I could make it a chorus somehow.
But, like, it sucks. It’s not anything. Truth is I didn’t want to do the work. I lacked imagination and convinced myself I was just adhering to my rules about keeping everything as simple as possible. Well, sometimes you’re just keeping everything as suck as possible, too.
On the last day I allowed myself to record vocals, I quickly stream of consciousnessly scribbled1 down some words. the ‘you form a night pyramid’ part is actually from another song I was working on concurrently, so I guess I cancelled it out of existence (for now). I sang the new ‘melody’ over the same four chords of the verse, then went back and changed the underlying progression according to how it complemented the new vocals:
I liked it fine, but it felt flabby, lifeless. Couldn’t make progress because I was gripping onto a bass riff and some dope guitar parts I recorded (two that you can still hear in the clips above in the left ear) when the song was dictating a direction away from all of that. As Poot in The Wire says, “World going one way, people another…”. I needed to listen to the song, what it wanted to be, and follow suit.
Before that, however, I went on another guitar tangent because me:
At a certain point you say to yourself: who cares? no one’s gonna listen to you! have they ever? no. so there you go. finish it & move on!
I think what ‘works’ about the ‘final’ (ha ha) version is the delineation. There’s a separation between verse and chorus here that renders the chorus more…chorus-y. I was following the ‘soft’ verse into ‘hard’ chorus thing when pulling back, letting the bottom drop, and giving space to my voice works just as well:
It’s an easy cheat: 1. Mute the drums. 2. Drop them in again. There’s your structure.
Do I think it still needs more energy? You bet your a** heck fuckin’ yeah. But, you know: whatever. Throw in a couple samples from Splice.com, call it a day. Go to Vons, pick up a crate of those mini blueberry muffins, eat ‘em all in two sittings2. They’re not as good as muffinormative-sized ones but I don’t have standards. It’s Vons. You think it’s not as many calories because they’re so tiny but that’s only if you eat one, not every. Then if you’re lactose intolerant like me, spend the rest of the night in the bathroom and that’s it. Life lived.
All right, get outta here.
tell yer friends to say hi [IRL / substack / instagram / tumblr / letterboxd]
stream the music [spotify / apple]
buy the .wavs & tapes [bandcamp]
inasmuch as you can ‘scribble’ on a TextEdit file
a sitting is a unit of measurement meaning standing at the sink and not moving from said position until you've shocked yourself with the amount of food you just packed in