I seem to finally be in a songwriting phase again. It's nice, even though when I am, jazz seems to fall by the wayside a bit. I guess that's kind of the point, though - I've seen jazz as a way to develop my toolchest all for the purposes of better songwriting.
Over the weekend I had drums and bass at my house to work on some ideas. I got a recording of The Aaaaaay Song with drums and bass and I'm pretty happy with how it's going to sound. A couple things surprised me. One, it wants to go at a faster tempo. But the other one is something I've learned before. You add instruments to any piece of music, and it just starts sounding more approachable. Something about adding more humanity or emotionality or life to it, it just makes things more accessible.
I learned this most intensely back when I was writing a full orchestral score for a few minutes of film score. When the full orchestra came into perform the composition, it was stunning just how much all that music glued together into something that sounded almost simple.
As a result, this song sounds a lot nicer, and a lot more poppy than I first thought. It changes my idea of the lyric concept, and I'm still working on that. I still despise how difficult lyrics are to come by sometimes. I'm halfway tempted to get another lyricist for this song, but... I've never done that before and am not sure I want to start now.
In the meantime, another former song idea of mine latched on to me with a vengeance, and in a way I am even further along with that one than I am with The Aaaaay Song. It's a very wild and weird feeling to have two of my own partially-completed songs constantly playing in my head, competing for my attention. It's a little bit like a death match, except happy and musical... and with no blood or gristle... anyway, one of the two songs is very definitely catchier than the other.
On top of that I woke up today with another song in my head. A protest song about America. I mean, it's actually about loving America, but it's still a protest song and probably wouldn't keep anyone from being offended by it. Whatever. I often hate those songs anyway, so I might just let that one die. We'll see.
