The same, the same, the same...

The same, the same, the same…

I’ve found myself going back to old music in recent months – not just looking at what I have in the way of compositions, but listening to rough recordings I’ve made over the last 8 years or so and wondering why I’ve left them to fester away in dark corners of my hard drive. It’s an odd thing, listening to music you created years ago – in some cases it feels like you’re listening to someone else, but then you start to sing along and realise that your voice is actually the one you’re hearing on the recording. The same, the same, the same…

Many of these pieces and songs are complete, with just a few abandoned half cooked (although in some cases I wonder why). The romantic in me imagines piles of manuscripts gathering dust in the back of a cupboard in 18th century Vienna, waiting to be rediscovered, dusted off and performed…but of course, the modern world is such that a couple of careless strikes of a keyboard can mean your entire body of work is deleted, erased from history for all time. So I find myself wanting to protect this part of me, whatever that might be and no matter how it might be perceived, and thinking about whether it’s time perhaps to let it out, let you hear it. Let’s be clear though, this is old music, probably all pre-2008, so not POAEM, Threes, Maelstrom, or any of that. Since disappearing into my little world to write, I’ve come round to new ways of thinking about things like recording, and writing, and all those other things that used to keep me awake at night because I wasn’t ever happy with anything I produced – and I’m now of the opinion that music is pointless without an audience; really, I might as well never have written it at all if I never let anyone hear it. So I’m going to start putting some of these rough recordings up here somewhere, sometime, soon. Or I might bottle out. But I made the first bold step tonight, posting a crazed piano improvisation onto the ‘Metamorphosis‘ album. The title of this weird piece is “Thoughts of a Mad Woman No.1”, implying that there might be more thoughts to come in a moment of madness. Was it me? Or was it someone else? I suspect it was me, in which case the next time I feel mad I’ll be sure to hit record before I attack the piano. Not sure I can bring myself to call it “Number 2” though.

I found a real gem though, in this search for my former self. This is a particularly unusual thing, a song I wrote in 2004 in which I set a friend’s words to music. Why unusual? In general, I have avoided collaboration. There are one or two people I’d consider writing with – we’ve even discussed the possibility of doing so – but I’ve never quite dipped my toe in the water because, essentially, I’m a complete control freak. In particular, I find other people’s lyrics difficult, uncomfortable even – I don’t mean that I don’t like them, but that I find it really hard to tap into other people’s ways of expressing things. This “gem” of a song I found was one such experience though – the words are more like prose than lyrics, in fact, if I recall correctly, that’s how they were written…but I remember sitting down and trying to find a rhythm within that might start to bring a melody, and lo and behold I managed to do it. I’ve been listening to this song all evening, waiting for the moment that inevitably comes (especially with my own music!) where I can’t stand to listen any more, and it hasn’t happened. I love it because it’s not all mine. I love that these words that came from someone else forced me into a place that I would not normally go, and I love how I found a way of expressing those words in a musical style and arrangement that I wouldn’t normally use. So…this is a song that I want to revisit. If my friend, the writer of those words, is happy for me to indulge my desire to bring new life to this song with a new recording (for this one I’ve been listening to really is too awful to release in its current state) then I must capture it – exactly as I did in 2004 – so that you can hear it. This does, however, mean that I am going to have to brush off the guitars. I haven’t touched a guitar for 3 years or more.

Of course, when it comes to it, I’ll hover over the “publish” button in my usual state of indecision with all of these songs I’ve been reminiscing over. “Should I, should I really let people hear this?” – because, in the end, it’s hard to shake off bits of you that still feel the same, the same, the same…