Tuesday, May 05, 2020

Song Writing

I'm not posting a lot at the moment because it is marking season.
I confess, I'm touched by the writing of the third year students this year: it is thoughtful, mature and positive.
These young people deserve a better government and a better future than this.
Maybe I should have gone into politics instead; it was on the cards, because I worked at the Labour Party headquarters for a while. But there was no music in it, and if I don't do music it's as though half of me has gone. It was amazing what rats coming up our toilets did to my motivation to become involved in changing things. Imagine feeding a baby at three in the morning, and hearing them splashing about in the toilet bowl in the bathroom next door.
Even if I became a millionaire nothing would convince me that it's OK for anyone to live like that, anywhere.
Meanwhile, in between marking, long distance song writing is happening. The Desperado Housewives song is all but finished: I just have to assemble it in Logic, because my chorus bit finishes it. Kath has written some hilarious verses, and Jude has written a dreamy middle-16. My job is chorus mistress.
Writing this way is fun because it's rather like assembling IKEA furniture without a plan and without an Allen key; you don't quite know what is going to happen, and you know it's not going to be 'normal'. I'm doing one with Michel, and one with Vinnie, and out of the blue Jem from Asbo Derek sent me some words. They are all so different, and what we can do technically with the limited equipment that we each have at home is part of what goes wrong and what goes right in the song.
I like it!
It's like being a song scientist, daisy-chaining these bits together. At first, I thought they were just demos we were making but now I think it's a genre with its own aesthetic.
BTW excuse my spelling mistakes. I'm dyslexic and I don't care any more. We are in the middle of a deadly epidemic, still functioning as well as we can, and governed by nincompoops.
Ring-a-ding-ding dyslexia! Bring it on!

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