This morning, the shape of the projects we’re working on became clear to me.
Writing pop songs is an odd pasttime, or maybe it’s just that my approach is odd. The songs originate as fragments, which are then combined with other fragments, and the embryonic song then either dictates the direction of the lyrics or is adapted to suit a lyrical idea that’s been waiting around for an appropriate vehicle. This seems to work well enough for individual songs, but recently I’ve been working on writing an album, and the process of fragments becoming songs which are fragments of an ideally cohesive album isn’t really working. One reason it hasn’t been working is that I never figured out what this album was supposed to be (apart from good). It’s sort of like taking puzzle pieces and putting them together to form larger puzzle pieces and then getting into a car and placing those pieces in mailboxes around the city and then driving home and having a drink and watching an old movie while keeping an eye out for the mailman. The success of the venture depends entirely on the quality of movie, I suppose.
Over the past few weeks, Roboctopus has come up pretty consistently in a variety of conversations. I hadn’t really thought about it in a while, because hell, it’s done and over with. But it was mentioned often enough that it worked its way into my brain and forced me to consider it. And, more to the point of this post, it made me think about what kind of songwriter I am.
It’s odd that I’ve never really thought about it. Wait, no, it’s not odd–I’m not a songwriter, so why would I think about it? Sure, I write songs, but I also play tennis, and I’m definitely not a tennis player. On the whole, it’s probably a bad idea to think of myself as a songwriter, but it’s too late. It happened.
Blah blah blah: in evaluating my perceived strengths and weaknesses, it turns out that I probably work best with conceptual/narrative-driven songs/projects.
I guess how I arrived at the idea doesn’t matter too much to anybody but me, but I needed to write it out to make sure I made sense to myself.
So here’s what we at DYM will be working on this spring and summer:
- Mixing and finishing the Tough Nuggets EP.
- Musicians of Sound: Soundtrack to the Motion Picture. Details on this will be forthcoming once I make sure that what I have in mind is logistically feasible.
- Maintain the Feel EP. This is probably going to include the three songs that are currently slated for Musicians of Sound, as well as any decent-enough songs that don’t quite fit with what I have in mind.
- A new rock opera. What the hell, right? Townshend has written four or five, so we can probably get away with two.
So there you go. Two conceptual narrative projects, two random-ass EPs. We’ll see how it goes.
