Candelabra Sessions - A Personal Review

can-de-la-bra - n. A large decorative candlestick having several arms or branches.

After coming off of an intense week of songwriting, recording, and mixing, it's always a good idea to take a minute an reflect on one's work. Per the posts that appear before this one, you can see that last week I made an effort to write and demo five songs in five days. The idea behind the project was to use positive pressure to produce a (hopefully) good outcome. My thinking was that if at least one of these five songs was subjectively good by my standards, then I'd have done a good thing.

In spending some time with the five songs I wrote, I've concluded that four of the five songs are compositions that I enjoy. There's one that I dislike. All of them are different from each other...each weaves it's way out of some aspect of my already twisted psyche. I saw a picture of a candelabra last week and I thought that the image was very much a metaphor for what was going on in my studio. One project with several independent appendages. If I had seven songs, I could call it the hydra sessions, but I couldn't pull that off.

As a songwriter, it's always important to maintain a writing dialogue. By that I mean, you have to write songs if you are going to call yourself a songwriter. The purpose of this session was many fold.

1. I hadn't written a song in about nine months. With the work I did in getting my DVD ready as well as my Gossman Passion production under way, songwriting wasn't a viable reality for me in recent months.
2. I'll be playing a few shows this summer and I'd like to have some new material.
3. I'm beginning to get more and more work as a producer. I wanted to showcase the quality of work I am capable of in a matter of days. When you hear these songs, yes, they were written and recorded in just five days.
4. I would like to help the world write better songs. If I have to hear one more song that rhymes "girl" with "world," I think I'm going to snap. When I share these songs with you, I'm going to elucidate the process(es) from which they arose.
5. My Marshall had a lot of dust on it and I just wanted to play it for a week. My ears feel like they have cotton in them from the intense volume, but I don't play it all the time. When I do, it's a special time.

So, how do you write a song? There is no accepted set of rules with songwriting, but it is important to have a process that works. Some people write by appointment. Some people write when they feel like it. Some people don't know how they write songs, but when they do it's pretty friggin' good. Some people write bad songs on purpose to make money. Some people write great songs and make no money.

As for me, I have three things that I have at my side when I sit down to "write." This is what I call my toolkit.

1. A legal pad - I like to write on a yellow legal pad, with 8 1/2 by 11 paper. I don't think this is technically a "legal" pad, but I like the yellow ones. If you ever see me with a yellow pad of paper, I'm writing a song.
2. A dictaphone - I use a small digital dictaphone made my Sony. It's archaic, but it's not one of those ones that run on tape. I use this to store musical ideas, phrases, and motifs. Often, I'll have a song about 60% finished when laying it into the recorder.
3. My Aleph List - This is a list of images that I've written in a personal journal for use and/or manipulation in a song. When I'm in a writing phase, I like to spend a half hour or so a day writing down interesting images, thoughts, reflections, or ideas into my list. I learned of this technique in a poetry class at UNC. I got a B in the class.

Once I have a bunch of songs mapped out, I'll make an arbitrary decision about which ones to develop. Going into this week, I had about 12 songs in some sort of amorphous, gelatinous state. I chose what I thought were the best five to finish.

So, the five songs that I wrote were these:

1. Civil Twilight
2. Roller Coaster
3. Two Shadows
4. Where There's a Door
5. Jenny's in Love

The first four are the ones that I like. My approval, like anything else in the artistic world, is entirely subjective. The fifth song "Jenny's in Love" feels wrong to me on a number of different levels. It's going into a folder on my Glyph drive labeled "Song Graveyard."

There are two inherent problems with this song. First of all, it's stock. I doubt you'll hear this song, but if you ever did, you'd immediately notice that it sounds like about five other songs I've either written or been a part of reconstructing in a live setting. I'm not going that way. I'm going this way. Secondly, the lyrics are far too dark for my taste. They're too dark for the pop sensibility of the music. It's a little too predictable. So, it gets the ax.

Now, the other four songs all have stories behind them. I look forward to sharing them with you in the weeks to come. Please tune into the Studio Journal for posting times and more information about this project. Also, if you're an aspiring musician, my studio doors are open.

Rock on, my friends.