Whenever I write a song, I always start with the music and then write lyrics that fit the meter and vibe. Sometimes these songs come together fairly quickly, but usually, they exist as instrumental tracks for months or even years before I come up with the words to accompany the riffs and chord progressions.
Case-in-point: I wrote the music for
Pablo Fiasco over a year before I crafted lyrics that seemed to fit. Even though it wasn't yet a finished song (and is still a work-in-progress, for that matter), I recorded early versions of it a long time ago, mostly so that I wouldn't forget it. In order to keep tabs on it as a saved file, I had to give it a name. As such, for most of its existence,
Pablo Fiasco was an instrumental track known (only to me, and the guy who was playing drums with me for a little while) as
The Ultimate Train Dodge.
Yes, that's a nod to the movie Stand By Me, and no, that didn't end up having anything to do with the song. Sometimes these early placeholder names factor into the lyric-writing process, but more often, they do not. They are just there for my own reference.
This past weekend, I recorded the first multi-track versions of a few more songs that I've been working on, none of which have much in terms of lyrics at this point. For the time being, they are called Talking Jive, It Could Have Been Worse, and Chrysalism, as those were the names that popped into my head when I was considering what kind of vibe each of these songs has, knowing that I had to save them as something. Talking Jive started as a thumping bassline, It Could Have Been Worse is built around a piano part that I wrote a while back, and Chrysalism began its journey as a chord progression on acoustic guitar. We shall see how they mutate as I continue to move forward in writing them.
In addition to these, I still have a few more songs to record that I have not yet written lyrics to, either, though the vocal melodies are starting to take shape. With those, I may work them out on acoustic instruments first, which is how I usually do it, although it is kind of nice having a drum track to keep it all in line.
In any case, it seems that a new album is indeed coming together, even though it's still kind of in soft-focus. The more I work on these songs, the more they will likely inform how I continue to develop the others, ideally moving them all toward some kind of stylistic and thematic cohesion that binds them together. That's the idea, anyway.
I'm old school, and I like to think in terms of albums, even if I'm generally only focused on one song at a time. Having recorded "sketches" of these songs, such as those that I put together over the weekend, gives me something tangible to work with, even if they don't yet have words or even permanent titles. They now exist outside of my head, which is an important step in the right direction.
As someone who grew up in the days of copying albums onto cassette tapes, I always shoot for around forty-five minutes as the ideal length for an album. Each of my six existing albums is designed to fit on one side of a
90-minute tape, just in case you happen to be stuck with only 1980s technology to get your music fix.
Album number seven, which is also yet to be titled, shall be approximately that length as well. I now have most of the music written; it's just a matter of writing the rest of the lyrics and then recording versions of these songs that I am happy enough with to officially release them. They are slowly coming together, one step at a time.
Thank you for supporting independent art. This is how it happens. Creation is a process.
