Right then.
Yesterday I watched some of my Songwriting Circle buddies perform as part of the mac birmingham (their lower case trendy insistence, not mine) open day for the new term’s courses. I could have joined in, but chose not to. My relationship with performance is a rocky one, that I haven’t quite pinned down yet. So subjecting myself to singing in a barn-like, clattery cafe didn’t seem like a good idea. I felt it would have perhaps have done more damage than good. I’m not looking to be a rock star baby. I am looking to build my confidence so that I am eventually able to sing in a gallery, in front of people I know without my lip sticking to my teeth and needing to throw up on the front row. This occasion would not have been the right one to do that, so I sat at the side like some group stalker, and cheered.
A week today we start the new term. I felt a bit guilty that I hadn’t done much to further my song writing since we broke up for the summer. So yesterday I got out my notebook. When I started out, the words were in amongst other stuff in my sketchbook, but that became impractical as I couldn’t easily find stuff, so now I have a special book. I’m nearly at the end of the second one! In this, everything I write has a title, a date, and a number. In the back there is an index. I have astonished myself with my organisation in this respect. I write in ink, not in pencil, because pencil is too tempting to rub out. Don’t rub anything out. I put one straight line through discarded phrases, so I can go back to them, either because I’ve changed my mind, or to use elsewhere. There are snippets I have used over and over, because I like them, but have yet to find the right context for them.
So, in looking at my book, I find I haven’t been lazy after all, I have 8 sets of lyrics dated since the end of term, and I have 3 GarageBand files full of sounds to work with.
Not quite sure how that happened, but I’m off to the studio now to do something with them.
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so… studio is besieged by power tools, diggers buses and the like, way too noisy to record anything. I look to the internet in the hope of revising my latest application, no luck there, internet down and out. The bacon butty van has run out of bacon. Sod it. I’m going home.
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Hour and a half later, I’ve sort of finished a song….
