Ether-Net

The other day, I was practicing guitar, and I came up with a chord progression that I rather liked. This kind of thing happens fairly often. What was unique about this particular occasion is that as I was playing it, I started singing the chorus along with it, as if I was just snatching it out of the ether with a butterfly net. After that, I sat down and wrote three verses to it, one right after the other. The whole process took about ten or fifteen minutes. In many ways, it felt more like I was transcribing this song than writing it.  

I'm presently about halfway into an original feature-length screenplay that I intend to have completed by the end of next month. As such, I did not plan on writing any more music for a while, especially considering that I just came out with a new album in January of this year. However, ever since that day that I plucked this fully ripened song from the universe, it has been stuck in my head. Multiple times this week, I have awakened to the chorus playing in the soundtrack of my sleep. 

Deciding that I shouldn't (and on some level, couldn't) ignore this any longer, I recorded a basic version of the song yesterday evening. I'll probably add a few tracks to it today. After that, I'm not really sure what to do with it, other than essentially set it aside until I've got about nine or ten more songs to go with it and can release it as another album. 

I don't usually write just one song and then go back to what I was doing before. Ordinarily, I work on other projects most of the year. When I need to take a break from writing or grading papers, I practice an instrument. As I rehearse, I come up with riffs and chord progressions that I like, and then once I've got about a dozen or so "song skeletons" saved up, I start writing lyrics to all of them. Each album usually has its own corresponding notebook. This is when I essentially switch into music-making mode for a period of time, during which songwriting becomes my primary creative outlet.  

That said, in addition to the peculiar way this song came to me, as well as its unusual timing, one of the other things that I think is particularly odd about all of this is that it's not really the type of song that I usually write. Not that I necessarily have any one genre of music that I adhere to, per se, but if I heard this song and didn't know better, I probably wouldn't think it was me. I conceptualized this song as something a person might hear coming out of a jukebox in a crowded bar, which isn't really my scene, even before the pandemic. It's called The Regular, and it's about That Guy who sits down at the end, the one who is always there. Every bar that I've ever been to has at least one of these guys, so it seems like it's probably a fairly universal thing. 

If I end up posting the demo version of my new song somewhere, I will include a link on this blog. [See above for more information.] 

Since this song isn't quite ready to share just yet, here's a song from my 2017 album Good Night, Fahrenheit called Carry On. (I didn't think I had a favorite album of my own work, but this seems to be the one I share the most songs from.) This track started with a piano riff, along with me thinking that there should be a song with that title. 

Thank you for supporting independent art. 

Happy Friday.