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A Slight Realisation


grace_slick

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This isn't another new song from Grace, but rather...I was thinking... :blah:

 

I was listening to my really early songs, and I now see how far I've come in terms of maturity and subtlety and arranging and lyrics...and yet at the time of writing those early songs, I felt some of them were DEFINITELY going to be on my debut album. Whereas now? NO WAY!

 

But I think that's always how it goes, isn't it? In another year I will no doubt look back at the songs I've written in the past 3 months and not have THEM on my debut album either...even though right now I am quite partial to them. :facepalm:

 

I wonder if every songwriter is like this in a way. Do albums that are actually released reflect just a...snapshot in time of that artist's work at any given stage? The album is static...a photograph...whereas the songwriting that goes on and the songs that are created constantly are fluid, constantly evolving, and thus like moving images...

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Hmm, true. Although his stuff nowadays is quite far removed from the songs of the Beatles, with him and John co-writing most of them. So he may well feel, while his recent songs aren't necessarily better than his older songs, that they are just more reflective of where he is now as a musician.

 

And I do still think that no matter how experienced you are, or how good others perceive your music to be, you are always still learning and evolving, so maybe even Sir Paul himself may agree with my theory. :)

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No rules. We're making the post-industrial music complex now.

 

I think it's not a bad idea to collect your songs from a given period into an album -- even if you don't release or promote it, it helps you see where you've been, who you're becoming. I wish I'd done a little more to lock some stuff down at times in the past. I was always thinking, oh, in few months, I'll have enough to really do something cool. So, you know, what I have instead is just a series of tapes (and later CDs) that I made as sort of slipstream updates to friends or others. But the handful of things that were formally collected into albums, given cover art and titles and the whole rigamarole, those things tended to stick with people more, and with me, more, too.

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Hmm. *nod* I think ideally we'd keep every single song we ever did that was actually fairly finished. I have kept pretty much all of mine. Unfortunately, with some of them I think I'm still too close / not evolved or far away enough to be able to appreciate them...I still cringe and worry I'll do a song like that again. :)

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This is why artists need producers.

If a producer was producing an album for you Grace, then he / she would most likely select something from your earlier body of work and re-record it.

 

We are usually the worst judge of our own work.

George Harrison handed up 'Handle with Care' for the B-side of a single - need I say more?

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Ah yes, "Handle With Care". I love that song. It's SO catchy and also tugs on the heartstrings (mine anyway, and many others too, or else nobody would know the song existed).

 

Fleetwood Mac didn't use Stevie Nicks' "Silver Springs" on Tusk in favour of "I Don't Want to Know", which in my opinion is absolutely NO comparison at ALL. But "Silver Springs" was too long and so they canned it. Stevie was livid. I would be too.

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I admit to forever rewriting my old songs (and poems and stories and so on) -- I am capable of recognizing their faults from the perspective of time and want to fix them. It does have a way of changing their tone, however, and reflects my own changes, for better or worse. Better, I hope.

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I was asked by a local radio station to pull together 3 tunes of mine for a locals Sunday night show. Flattering to be asked. Cool... so... 3 tunes. Well, my latest is my best of course and... no wait.. there's that one... {censored}. Well, this is easy cause that one sucks. And wait...

 

I don't think the songs have gotten better as much as the process has gotten easier for me. I know better how to get there. I don't recognize it any better now, I just do it faster. If that makes sense.

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I was asked by a local radio station to pull together 3 tunes of mine for a locals Sunday night show. Flattering to be asked. Cool... so... 3 tunes. Well, my latest is my best of course and... no wait.. there's that one... {censored}. Well, this is easy cause that one sucks. And wait...


I don't think the
songs
have gotten better as much as the process has gotten easier for me. I know better how to
get there.
I don't recognize it any better now, I just do it
faster.
If that makes sense.

 

 

"It never gets any easier, you just go faster" - Greg LeMond about cycling, but I think it is applicable here too... at least for me.

 

I believe songs are never done. They could always change, and sometimes do from performance to performance... at least for me, but I don't think that constant rewriting is a good thing for a songwriter. I'm not sure that came out like I wanted it to...

 

I think knowing how and when to do a rewrite is a valuable skill to have, but if it is all we do... if we never write anything new, I think it can be a bad thing. At some point, we need to accept that the writing stage for this particular song is done and move on to something new.

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"It never gets any easier, you just go faster" - Greg LeMond about cycling, but I think it is applicable here too... at least for me.


I believe songs are never done. They could always change, and sometimes do from performance to performance... at least for me, but I don't think that constant rewriting is a good thing for a songwriter. I'm not sure that came out like I wanted it to...


I think knowing how and when to do a rewrite is a valuable skill to have, but if it is all we do... if we never write anything new, I think it can be a bad thing. At some point, we need to accept that the writing stage for this particular song is done and move on to something new.

 

 

Exactly. It's part of what I was thinking as I posted but couldn't get out. See... I think that while it is true that great songs are re-written to a certain extent, the real deal is the seed of the idea, that first spark. That is where the beginnings of your next GREAT song are. So we search for that kick ass seed. While we re-write to make the most out of each seed, the bottom line is, the seed is the magic. The better the seed, the better the re-write, and the better the song.

 

We need to move on to find and plant more seeds.

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"It never gets any easier, you just go faster" - Greg LeMond about cycling, but I think it is applicable here too... at least for me.


 

 

After several years of writing, I think I've actually gotten slower. I guess I'm more conscious of the "crap factor" now and I start self-editing too early in the process.

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Neil Young once said that if he waited until every song was 100% finished, he only would have written one.

 

John Lennon was very vocal in the 70s about how much he disliked the Beatle catalog and that if he could, he'd go back and change every single song in some way.

 

Yeah, I think you could say we are not unique. :)

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Neil Young once said that if he waited until every song was 100% finished, he only would have written one.

 

 

YEAH, Neil Young, as surly and grumpy as he is, has it right in that quote.

 

And John Lennon too. Kate Bush also has said a few times that she never listens to her early stuff anymore because she's just moved on so much since then and all she can think of is how many changes she'd make to those previous songs. And since she tends to take 10 years sometimes to actually make an album, she has said this poses a problem too because by the time she gets to the later songs on the album, she wants to go back to the earlier ones and change them because it's been so long. lol.

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I've been meaning to chime in here.....

 

The album is static...a photograph...whereas the songwriting that goes on and the songs that are created constantly are fluid, constantly evolving, and thus like moving images...

 

As you know, I am trying to write a very fluid piece of work that in the old days may well have been called an album. I used to put together a CD every year of all the songs I wrote in that year. I have a sizeable stack over there on the shelf.

 

Times seemed to have changed with regard to how most people listen to music.

 

:cool::wave:

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Nothing of mine makes it to a CD that isn't wanted, realized and perfected. Another

thing is there is usually several years of accumulated material going out in a single day when I publish something. They {songs/ideas}

come to me as waves of ideas and then sound themes emerge. It all ends up being blended with tragedy, sympathy ecstacy and apathy in varying degrees, until I finally get over it and just get it done. I am close to another purging of the drives and another massive upload to the cloud...the next round is always better than the last.

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Most people don't even know what albums specific songs are on now, as they have their MP3 players set to "random" or "shuffle" and just listen passively. Nobody seems to buy CDs anymore even, as they just download stuff. It seems...kinda empty to me.

 

 

Most people don't buy vinyl anymore but yet there is trend of new vinyl sales increasing in relation to CD sales.

 

Some people still care. You have give them something to care about and be able to reach them. The second part is the bitch.

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Most of my early work in my youth was performance based. Got the audience going with catchy phrases, themes kids like me could identify with plus a powerful singing voice(which only surfaces at times now).

Then my life changed, got married, kids etc. and evolved musically. As I go back, sure I think a lot of that material isn't really what would be a polished song. However there must of been some talent there

as I was regarded as a singer songwriter back then. So I can dig up old cassete recordings from time to time and I do discover some elements of these efforts worthy of a total overhaul. Taking some of those melodies and

phrases and see if something good can be salvaged.

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There's a quote that you can probably attribute to a hundred different people that says - "Everyone is faking it."

 

I think one of the biggest mistakes a songwriter can make is to acknowledge genre. It's harder to fake.

If you acknowledge genre than you're automatically comparing yourself to the artists who defined that genre and without exception 100% of the time - you lose.

If you're into Paul McCartney and you write songs like Paul McCartney songs those songs will at their absolute zenith be second rate Paul McCartney songs.

 

If you march to the beat of your own drum - well, you'll always be a first rate you.

Looking back and seeing ugly probably has more to do with what we were trying to be then.

 

There's a thread on this board called Melody First, Then Lyrics.. I think when you follow that maxim your more likely to end up a second rate someone else.

I think we naturally tend to emulate what we hear.

 

Unless I'm experimenting or studying something I do and always have started with an idea. Levity. Noise. Claustriphobia. Whatever.

Next is how do I convey that?

 

Maybe I'm lucky in that way because when I listen back to older stuff I hear the idea, not so much the music itself. I cringe at performance issues but overall I hear a place.

That being said, I recognize stylistic differences. My super early stuff relied heavily on rhythm and repetition.. Melody or Harmony weren't real big factors - so I don't listen back and say "wow the melodies in that were terrible."

Then I started being interested in tone and I abandoned structure a lot of the time in favor of feel. Again, I don't listen back and think "that doesn't go anywhere."

Lately I've been getting into theory and the mechanics of it all and I think that's reflected quite a bit. I think you can hear that I'm manipulating things a bit more consciously.

 

As far as songs aging well in general - NOTHING ages well. Listen to some Minstrel music or a plainchant. Fifty or even a hundred years ago is the blink of an eye.

In comparison to how quickly culture changes - the inherent quality of a song itself (if there is such a thing) is pretty much irrelevant.

 

my 20cts

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You know what? That's true. I don't like to blab about who I apparently sound like in terms of my music because I simply don't think I DO sound like anyone! Not really. I'm just me, and that's what I want because it's comfortable and interesting and the less comparisons there are, the better chance of success, as you said above.

 

However, on so many music sites you're asked to list who you sound like. *groan* You're asked to list your musical influences and yes, I have many, but I don't SOUND like any of them so why is that really relevant to MY music?

 

Having said this, I still think the majority of listeners will still automatically group people into categories of sound. "I heard a new song / band today" "Oh, who'd they sound like?" It's a natural thing. People form judgements and categorise things in an effort to understand and thus live with a degree of familiarity and security in the world. Also it saves potential listeners from wasting their time when searching for new music. If you know you like people like Regina Spektor, Fiona Apple and Kate Bush, and you know you hate Rhianna, Chris Brown and the Pussycat Dolls, you're going to try to find new music that is more like the former rather than the latter IF you have any sort of choice. Comparisons are very useful in narrowing things down and people will usually use them to save themselves time.

 

So the choice I think is to either be compared to others but be the best, or somehow avoid being compared, which is highly unlikely. In some ways, simply refusing to pigeonhole yourself, although it does have some merit, is a bit like sticking your head in the sand about your own ability. If you're too "scared" to go into direct competition with other "better" songs or artists, well...what're you trying to accomplish, you know?

 

I can't even remember what this thread is about now, and I'm the one who started it!!! lol

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