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Do you ever suddenly remember a song that you'd written a while ago?


Stackabones

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Man, I just did! :thu:

 

Actually, this is the second time I've remembered it. I wrote it five or ten years ago as sort of gift song for the crowds that used to come out and see a band I was in. They liked the herb, so I wrote a song called High. Don't get any ideas, HCSWers, I've always preferred hops and wine to hash and weed. :cop:

 

I guess with a title like that I was bound to forget it.

 

About a year or ago I remembered it while driving and swore that I would find the time to record it or transcribe it out of my head. Then I forgot again. :facepalm:

 

Not gonna happen again! Just transcribed it and I'm gonna record it so that my contact short-term memory loss doesn't kick in again.

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I've recorded every song I've ever written that was worth slightly more than the dung in the back alley behind my workplace. Most of the time it's just a scratch recording but the slightly better ones get a full overdub-age workout.

 

I've forgotten about songs that I'd recorded and was pleasantly surprised to find them again at a later date - only to realize what a piece of crap they are and that there was a reason for forgetting in the first place. :cry:

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I don't record everything I write and I forget about songs all the time (even some I've recorded). But I write down all of my lyrics and keep them in the same place, so that's often good enough to jog my memory. Just last night I was flipping through some of them and came across a song I'd written a couple of years ago and remembered liking at the time. After about 20 minutes of trying to reconstruct it on my guitar, everything came back to me.

 

What I find really weird, though, is when old lyrics I haven't thought about in years will just pop into my head randomly.

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Even the bad songs are not always bad. They are just "misunderstood!"

 

As long as the song is halfway decent, it's just a matter of interpretation after that.

 

My own song "Jump Back" started as a bluesey type chord progression and it always seemed kind of like a redheaded stepchild to me... until I found a distorted guitar riff to go over it and all the sudden it became one of my favorites!

 

I love digging through my own old stuff, written, or recorded, and wondering if a fresh perspective could make it something more than it was before. I have a song called "Away" that is on a very back burner until I remembered it again and realized it needed to be sung by a gruff, bass voice singer. (It's a slow reflective song).

 

Your songs are like your children! None of them are really bad. Not in any way you can't improve.

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I don't know if this counts, I found an old cassette and remembered about a song I wrote from hearing it. Not quite "remembering" per se, I'm not sure if it would have come back to me if I had not heard it. There were certainly some songs I would LIKE to forget on that tape though!

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I don't know if this counts, I found an old cassette and remembered about a song I wrote from hearing it. Not quite "remembering" per se, I'm not sure if it would have come back to me if I had not heard it. There were certainly some songs I would LIKE to forget on that tape though!

 

Oh, yeah, that counts!

 

About a month or so ago, a girl who was a fan of a band I used to be in asked me to play a song from that band. I hadn't thought about it in a decade. I'd even helped write the main riff and most of the chorus. I couldn't remember enough to even start reconstructing it. :facepalm:

 

I think she's trying to locate a copy of it. :)

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So your thread here got me to perusing some notebooks. I ran across this one I had forgotten about.

 

You Leave Me Blue

© 2007 Elias Graves

 

I first saw her at the park one day last July

She's the kind of girl who'd always catch your eye

I thought that I would sneak

One tiny little peek

And be content to let her walk on by

Well the fates had other things in store that day My plans they all just gone another way

She was staring right at me

And Lord what did I see?

A look that said "I'm here to stay"

 

Chorus

What yu gonna do with me baby

Some witchy spell you put on me

What you gonna do with me baby

You take me down by degrees

What you gonna do with me baby

I'm losing control

What you gonna do with me baby

Won't you ever let me go?

What you gonna do with me baby x2

What you gonna do

 

She swiftly fanned our relationship from smoke to fire

Never knew a girl with such intense desire

She slowly broke my back

Gave me a heart attack

Now I'm kept alive with wires

I understood my situation to be insecure

Asked my friends to help me off the floor

Joe said "Dude you gotta go

"Lift your feet now don't be slow

"I don't think a man can long endure"

 

Chorus

 

Joe's wisdom heeded quickly, man I moved away

I was blessed to live to see another day

So relieved to take a breath

Without a threat of sudden death

And mighty happy to be on my way

Well the cobwebs in my mind grudgingly disappeared

I could move again without spasmodic fear

You ask me what I've learned

From thse bruises that I've earned?

I like her better there than here

 

Chorus

You leave me blue

 

EG

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I have done that a lot. My new CD has one song that I hadn't done in years, Think of the Children; this was a nuclear freeze song that just needed a couple of word changes to fit our current challenges. Another song on that disc, Yin and Yang, is one that I did a few times in the 80's and totally forgot. I know that the chord pattern and first verse are "original" from the 80's, but the rest is a re-write.

 

I am about to record three more of my 1980's social-issue songs, one "as-is," one with slight editing, and one with major re-writes. The last one, Peace Song, is special to me as that is the song that Pete Seeger once sang along to. (A golden moment in my life.)

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