how not to write a song (part 2)
regarding the long gestation of 'lessons for a son'
Autumn, 2019: ‘Todd’
I love the guy, but I don’t want Todd to get too familiar with me. He’s a wild squirrel after all. But no day is better spent than going to Super King and handpicking various nuts for ol’ buddy to try, checking out at the counter and getting a $1.09 grand total. Practically skippin’ out the store. It’s the most satisfying purchase.
He says fuck all that pistachio though. Loves walnuts. I crack ‘em partway so it’s a little easier for him to open. Has no use for the water I try to give him. Think I should stop feeding him. It’s not in his best interest. I find him standing on his hinds at the backdoor waiting for me. His friends chirp and mill around in the background. Sorry T, have to let you go.
I’ve basically given up on “Lessons For A Son”. Weeks, months pass before I dare open the project, and when I do, I’m simply muting and unmuting tracks, tweaking EQs. Then my Macbook, it says to me, ‘Listen, I’ve got, like, 800 megabytes left in me. Put me out of my misery!’ And I close the lid.
October 26, 2020: ‘The Chorus (Part 2)’
You get bogged down again. You let too much time pass, you forget all your intentions, your ideas, the trillionth extra secret thing that’s gonna crack the whole case.
Here’s four iterations of the ‘chorus’. Unsure of what kinda vibe I’m going for. This is indecisiveness. This is a lack of vision:
September 3, 2022: ‘Inclusion’
Years have passed. Why do I treat my life with so little care? Like I’ve got a new one comin’ ‘round the bend I can look forward to.
Anyway. I open the 3.85gb Logic project. I check that it’s the right file (there’s 3 others titled ‘lessons erase me later(#)’ which I haven’t found the courage to open yet lest I discover I wrote a completely different song there too).
In the planning and compiling of this album (codenamed CAR BOMB), it’s become clear that there’s a cohesion in ‘theme’, or ‘mood’, or ‘sound’. It’s informing the direction of the song when before I had zero direction except ‘make cool, people like me, I happy then?’. But listening to the tracks one after another, I finally see the thread. It’s piano. It’s ‘orchestra’. It’s drama. Goodbye erratic spasms of random samples. I mute most of the guitars; whatever remains of them is more for texture. I have clarity.
This is why I took so long. I never knew what I wanted the song to be, and I didn’t allow the song to tell me what it wanted to be. If I don’t know, then all I’m doing is relying on the ideas to take me somewhere. Which is fine, but there was so much muchness I couldn’t machete my way through the thicket. So I stayed lost. Taking in these ten songs together as a whole was the key to giving me the answer of what the songs wanted to be. I could see the movie, the faces of the actors, the beginning and ending. Doesn’t matter if this is the right or wrong path, and maybe down the line I come upon the definitive version, the perfect instrumentation, but within this world I’ve created of the album, this must be. In service of the song, the album, not of me.
You hang on to things, you know. Just because I wrote a song on a guitar doesn’t mean it has to be a guitar song. What a silly thought!
September 6, 2022: ‘The Panic’
OK, but why not have guitar and samples and synths? Ha ha ha ha ha. Let’s get everybody back together! Harps! Horns! A frog! You want me to let things go? Do you even know me? There’s a guitar riff that’ll blow your areola clean off! This vocal sample that’s so slick you could slide across ‘em by your unblown areola.
~100 samples, like of horns, etc.
6 different types of piano
3 kinds of harps
9 choir types
16 claps
10 guitars
3 separate basses
2 celestas
6 kinds of flutes
2 organs
2 mellotrons
36 synths
17 drum kits / samples
11 ambient samples, including frogs for no reason
September 9, 2022: ‘Trust’
No no no no. Resist temptation. Start again. Strip everything out except vocals + piano. No electronic instruments. Add in flourishes later when everything’s set. You wrote this song the old-fashioned way, on an acoustic instrument, so stick with the original arrangement instead of piecemeal collaging shit in. This is enough.
: : : FILE NAMING | TANGENT | ALERT : : :
So during the process I’m constantly bouncing out wav files to highlight specific parts either I want to keep as is or work on or whatever. I need these reminders. Unfortunately I have no organizational skills, and I usually name them quickly without any brain function and then months later, I’ve forgotten how to locate them because the names are complete horseshit. Here’s a short selection of files associated with ‘Lessons For A Son’:
TOPOCHICO!!!!
FILLED COLLINS
PEENS AND STREENS
TEXMEX T-REX NOT IMPRESSED WITH THE SEX
ANA GELATINOUS
VERY BREATHY BOYS
DINERS DRIVE-INS DIVES AND DICKS
SONG SONGSONGSONG 2
HEIDLEMAN THEORY (no idea what this means)
December 16, 2022: ‘The End?’
Then I share the part of the song where it’s all guitars. Can you believe you’re getting all this hardhittin’ content for free?
It sounds outdated to me. I don’t know. Me singing the ‘la la la’ part is funny to me, so there’s that. And the choruses are flabby, no energy.
Really, who cares—I’m done! I’m over it! Can’t ‘work’ on it anymore. I’m putting a stop to myself. This is how songs get finished, when you can’t stand it anymore!
December 28, 2022: ‘But’
The song could be a little faster…1
tell yer friends to say hi [IRL / substack / instagram / tumblr / letterboxd]
stream the music [spotify / apple]
buy the .wavs & tapes [bandcamp]
anybody know a clean, non-destructive way to speed up an entire song that’s not varispeed or whatever reaper does? Hit me up in the comms.
So you’re just gonna leave out the part where Todd sank his fangs into your finger while you were trying to ‘gume him? On second thought, I think you wrote about that in another entry, but I’ll never let it go.