Self Reflecting Your Music

[Ernest Buckley]

Maybe I`m overthinking this but I was thinking how different sounding my new album "The Hundredth Monkey" (November 2013) sounds from my first record "Be Your Own" (2007). Then I started thinking about my third record which I already wrote some tunes for and have a working title for ("Exit") and how it will sound...

Then I realized all three records sounded nothing like each other!

Its almost like three different people wrote these records... I realized the person I was while writing that first record in 2000 to 2006 is not the person that wrote the second album from 2006 to the present. I can only imagine what my 3rd record will sound like. Considering I only put out a record every 5-6 years, alot happens in that time. So I was wondering... 

Do you hear your life in your music? Do you hear the person you were and who you`ve become? 

I also deliberately try to work with different sounds from one record to another so that influences the sound but I`m also talking about the lyrics. My first record "Be Your Own" was mostly acoustic, then towards the tail end of that project I started to dabble with REASON. I actually used REASON on one track from that record, it was the song "Everyday Is Sunday".... the last song we mixed. Eventuallly I started to use REASON for preproduction on what would become my second album, The Hundredth Monkey. Now while listening to these songs grow into their own, there is no doubt how much an influence working in REASON had.

Interestingly, as I finish up The Hundredth Monkey, I just purchased Native Instruments Komplete Ultimate... It`ll be interesting to see how much this program will influence my next record....

So how about you... are you aware of these changes in your own material? Has your sound changed? How about the lyrics? 

[Mark L]

This is a very interesting topic, Ernest

Here's my position. Looking back at the stuff I was writing, say, 15 years ago, my songs sound roughly the same. I don't really do that much, so I don't really have that much to write about. A good number of my songs are written from the perspective of an imaginary third party - 'You Never Leave The Light On', for example

But I have an urge to write, so I have to write about something. And I still have the same sense of humour that I had when I was a teenager. I'm a boy trapped in a man's body! Help!!

So, to answer your question......NO

[blue2blue]

 

I would have to say that after my first decade of writing (I didn't start playing music until I was 20), my writing settled more into personal territory. My first decade, it was all over the map, from pretentious literary allusions (from books there was only a 50-50 chance I'd read), to deeply personal but surrealistically veiled allegories, to sometimes embarrassingly straightforward agitprop, to archly sardonic topical songs ("The Ballad of Squeaky Fromme," for instance), to attempts to write formula material. (I always wanted to write at least one great disco song. One of these days.)

 

But, you know, over the years, I drifted more to writing from the gut -- even when the 'action' seems far-removed from my own life. But, even when the situations are 'exotic,' they tend to reflect my inner realities and feelings.

[nat whilk II]

I suffer from, or maybe am blessed with, depending on how you look at it, universal, perpetual curiosity.  So my personal journey resembles a fly trapped on Noah's ark.  There's so much "stuff" here to check out!!  Each so different and  fascinating and alluring!!!  Never can give any particular item enough proper attention!

 

On the other hand, the stuff, however briefly visited, does seem to stick to some extent.  So whatever I'm doing now seems to have the combined aroma of all the places in my past in varying degrees.  There's so much tucked away in the subconscious that, when I'm really "on" creatively, so much percolates up and out - it's almost like watching someone else paint.   Desperately wish that would happen more often, but you take what you can get.  

 

Different artistic disciplines, and different cultures and eras seem to draw different levels of accomplishments from people as they go through the succeeding stages of life and aging.  Why do so many pop music types in our culture seem to dry up after 35 or so?  Why do classical composers so often go on and on and on and just keep getting better and more subtle way into old age?  Painters, too.  Sometimes poets, but poets are the most unpredictable and varied lot.  Writers are all over the place - novelists seem to fall off after say, 60 or so as a vague guess on my part.  But not scholars or physicists or philosophers so much.  Skills might diminish in the physical realm, but artistic and creative instincts are another thing.  

 

All this to say, I feel that the longer I keep at it, the more potential I have, and the more it all is "me" as all the backstory and training and experience has been accumulating and digesting and making what once was "other" into what is now "me".   But at some point...sure.

 

nat whilk ii

 

 

[Beck]

 

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Ernest Buckley wrote: So I was wondering... 

Do you hear your life in your music? Do you hear the person you were and who you`ve become?

 

 

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Yes absolutely!  One thing I hear very clearly when going back over my music over the years is my struggle to be true to my inner song rather than being overly influenced by contemporary music of the time... whatever place in time I was living.  My music tends to refind itself and change back to something more true to myself, and then it strays again.  I can hear this process over and over going back to the late 1970's.