Curt Siffert

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.

Songwriting is so weird. My last two completed songs (Cold and Clown) were basically one-nighters. And I suppose it's possible my next song might be a one-nighter too, since they tend to come out of nowhere. But right now I'm working on one that has just been so slow in coming.

I don't know what other songwriters are like, but I definitely do have some favorite sounds and voicings. The trick is to dress them up so they are just tools, part of a larger original sound. One of my favorite sounds is one that is in Del Amitri's "Driving With The Brakes On", my piano improv Before A Kiss, a few sections of my favorite jazz standards... you get the picture, these things are all over the place.

I was playing with it and came up with something that sound poppy and fresh to my ears. A good indication for me is if I don't get sick of playing something over and over again. It pretty quickly expanded into a four bar phrase that I felt would be perfect for a chorus, and I could play it over and over again.

The problem with coming up with the chorus first is that you never want to get out of it. And this one just had such a strong root feeling that I just felt worried I wouldn't be able to do it justice in the rest of the song. Having the verse in the root would make the chorus more boring than it is. And did I really want to just take it down to the vi and start the verse there? I'd play the chorus pattern and feel happy and then I'd start exploring other material and would just get grumpy.

I was stuck there for months. I brought the material into my Triage rehearsals (my fusion trio with Steve and Steve) just to hear what it sounded like with bass and drums - I love the sound - but I didn't want to make it part of our collective material.

So finally I decided, screw it, even though I liked this being conventional and poppy, I clearly don't have patience with those conventions. So I started fiddling around with weirder chord progressions. I like that quite a lot - the way the chorus moves in the clown song is part of what I love so much about the song. And sometimes it's like painting yourself in a corner just to see if it's possible to gracefully get out.

That opened up possibilities a bit, finally. About two weeks ago I started playing with the idea of the verse being a whole step below the chorus. It's wild - in order for the melody to sound natural and singable, it really has to slam the lydian mode. I finally came up with the complete song form - while it's a conventional song form, it doesn't make functional diatonic sense in one key, the melody and chorus really have to modulate back and forth.

I'm loving it so far and I have the whole form put together, complete with melody. The problem is that unlike some of my other songs, the entire musical idea came together before the lyrics did. Even down to how the syllables are stressed in the lyrics - uh-oh. I guess that answers a common songwriter question, whether we write music or lyrics first. For me it's entirely driven by the song in question. I have a couple of others where the lyrics are all written, but with only a rough idea of the music (been really hard to move forward on those).

So all I know at this point is that the chorus starts with "a bom bom bom, be-yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay". So right now, the damn thing is titled "The Aaaaaaay Song" in my iTunes. I regularly play it on my stereo while driving my truck, and scat along trying to find a lyric concept. I thought I had found a couple of concepts but it's difficult so far. All I really know at this point is that it'll be following a reality-hope-destination (verse-prechorus-chorus) pattern. But the lyric concepts I've had so far are dumb and don't do the music justice. Still working.

Well, about a week ago my hard drive died and that was a lot of fun. I didn't lose anything in the way of music - just two revisions of one of my piano musings, when the one I wanted to keep is still around. And some recordings from my jazz trio rehearsals, but I've already uploaded them on a website so I still have them. Still, annoying. I think I've just about decided to invest more in to an actual desktop computer system so I have some redundancy.

The other advantage of that is that I will be able to start getting back into multitracking. Right now the only multitracked song I have is Together, and I'd like to do more of it.

Saturday night, I recorded some more versions of All Aboard and Balancing Above The Air, with the intention of finally getting demo-quality songs that I could put up on garageband.com. I didn't quite get there, but it was still nice to come up with a couple more versions I can listen to and examine. These recordings have piano and drums. I might upload them here in the future - still letting them sink in.

I just tried playing through I Have A Cold, Balancing Above The Air, and My Favorite Clown, one right after the other. Oy. It's been too long since I've played them through. And I don't think I've ever played them through back to back before. I've got to practice those more regularly. I just put myself on a schedule to do it every three days.

Lisa Albinger has finished the painting that was inspired by My Favorite Clown, here is a picture:

My friend Lisa Albinger, a full-time artist and recent new resident of Portland, is working on a painting inspired by My Favorite Clown. She has some pictures up of the work in progress. What fun! I'll post a picture of the finished work here when it's completed.

One of the things I'm trying to learn how to do is how to promote these songs effectively online. I'm not even thinking about how to earn money on them yet as the first step is to build audience.

First step is to upload a new song and tell my family and friends about it. I've done that. Next step is to figure out ways to make it a bit more viral and submit it to services, though. And for that I need your help!

I'm a member of GarageBand, iLike, and Facebook, and they're all kind of linked together. So if you want to help out, please do any or all of the following:

• Visit my artist page on facebook and add my music to your facebook profile. It's easy, all you have to do is click the "Add to Profile" link next to the song. You can also then choose to dedicate it to your friends if you like and encourage them to add it to their profile (and tell them to dedicate/pass on, ad infinitum). But also make sure to click the "(click) to iLike" button below my picture!
• Visit my iLike page, and click the "iLike" button on the page. You can also click on each of the songs and click the "iLike" button for each of them as well. It appears most important to "iLike" the actual artist, because that improves how often I get recommended to other people that might like my music. Fastest way, click this button:
  
  
  
  
  

There are probably other things I could do but I haven't found them yet. Leave me a comment if you have ideas.

One of the fun things about having my stuff up online is that people will occasionally ask permission to use them for random things. Yay Creative Commons. Paul Ivanov asked permission to use All Aboard for a local contest having to do with the Berkeley International House. Here's the resulting video - my music starts about 1:30 in. It's just a rehearsal recording of my song, and Johns Williams is a tough act to follow, but it's always fun to see one's own work applied to someone else's stuff.

Well, it's been almost four months since I've launched this site. I've wanted the site to become something akin to a framework, workflow, and representation of my efforts as a musician. I think I've succeeded there. Whenever I create or accomplish something musically, I have a place to put it. So now (and perhaps this is partially because of how me having a cold affects my brain), I'm moved to review and think about how it's all working.

"A place to put it" is interesting. Because if I were to merely keep these things in my head, in iTunes, on a scratch piece of staff paper - they'd still exist, I suppose, but it doesn't feel like any of them have life until I put them somewhere where there's a chance other people might experience them, or perhaps enjoy them.

But everything has a home right now. I have a place for my song drafts. A place for my improvised piano pieces. A place for my jazz standards (although a password is needed there). A place where I can write about what I'm doing, a mailing list where people can sign up, which gives an excuse to summarize my own progress to give myself benchmarks.

So far it's a good experiment - all combined, I've interacted with this site in some way every day since then. It kind of gives me something to react to, which helps me take music more seriously in a way that feels natural rather than disciplined. It's having good results too - I thought up, wrote, and learned I Have A Cold in about three hours. It's a stupid silly song, and I was completely punchy - laughing about it while hopped up on cold medicines - the sort of thing where the mood that drove the creation of the song would have passed in a few hours. Six months ago I would not have been able to capture that complete song in time. (Which, in the case of that particular song, might have been a good thing! :) ) But it's a cool feeling to feel that I am starting to have a more direct pipeline into whatever it is that enables us to write cohesive songs.

I've started to look at the site as a marketing vehicle, too. Not that I have anything to sell at this point, but I have liked the idea of the site gradually attracting readership/listenership. I'm going to use a bad word here. I am currently what is known as a "hack". :) The real definition of a hack is someone who gets their support by people already known to them. I'm basically tracking my "hack quotient" by keeping track of who is on my mailing list. Right now, almost everyone on my mailing list is someone that I already know - family and friends. If I divide the number of People I Know by the number of People On The List, then that means I have a "hack quotient" of somewhere between 91.3% and 95.6%. I am hoping that number decreases over time! I do notice that viewership is increasing a bit, which is encouraging. Some from a couple of links I create, like my sig at an unrelated discussion board I frequent, or a couple of comments I've left over at jonathancoulton.com (my unwitting mentor), but I'm also noticing an increasing number of google searches for "curt siffert" and also for Balancing Above The Air.

The question is what to do next. It's fun to think about what level of success one can get just by focusing on the online end, but I really don't want to limit myself to that. There are several challenges and possible directions here.

I'd like to play out. I haven't performed for too many months now, although performing for my recorder does at least help a little. The problem is basically repertoire and instrumentation. I'm not a guitarist, so I am not as flexible as a guitarist singer/songwriter. I now have two songs that I can perform as a solo singer/pianist, but they're both what I like to think of as "contrast songs". I need more meat and potatoes songs. I also have two songs that can be performed as a group with a guitarist, although Together would require some thought on how to arrange it. Basically I just need to create more rep.

I do have an instrumentation - I know both a good drummer and bass player who would be psyched to play out with me once we have material. I love the idea of doing some Jamie Cullum crossed with Ben Folds type stuff. And my band Deja Nu is also interested in performing some three-horn arrangements of my stuff too as I write it. So I've definitely got options. It's basically up to me to come up with material.

There's also the option of me pursuing new age piano stuff, although it doesn't particularly thrill me to consider being a new age live performer. But I am currently in the midst of producing a cd of some of the better tracks. It'll be a short run for now, just to get things up and sellable on iTunes.

Beyond that it's about just creating more songs and seeing what opportunities and brainstorms happen. I'm also thinking about whether it makes sense to keep uploading rough drafts of material here. There's kind of a quality point material needs to be at before you'll start attracting the kind of attention that will lower the "hack quotient". :) But for now, I'm happy with the way things are.

There seem to be a fair amount of google searches for Balancing Above The Air that land here. I wonder how people are finding the song...