I have binders and notebooks full of old completed songs, and ideas for new songs. A lot of these binders and notebooks are a decade old, and while I’m open-minded enough to see the potential in some of those ideas, I actually cringe when I attempt to sift through all this material.
I was playing some of the songs I wrote back in high school this evening. I shuddered when I encountered a chord progression that doesn’t conform with my formal training. No, no! It should go to this chord, not that one.
But I forced myself to deal with it, and I have to say, I did find a few rough nuggets in all that derivative material. One of the first songs I wrote I was titled, “Ragged Edge”, and oh, are the lyrics juvenile. So was the chord progression. But then, I started messing around with what was there, doing things with the bass line I wouldn’t have known to do back in high school, using chords I hadn’t yet learned at the time.
And before I knew it, I was onto something I liked.
Same goes for this other song that was directly inspired by Arcadia’s “El Diablo”. I edited the harmonic rhythm a bit and liked what I heard.
I even unearthed this requiem I wrote in high school, which has Andrew Lloyd Webber and Enya written all over it. I hadn’t learned the correct cadences for the Latin text, so now the music strikes me as clumsy. But there’s an ambition to the work that makes me want to go back and mold it some more.
I guess what I’m trying to say is I have a lot of material, and I could conceivably keep myself busy editing, rewriting and recording this stuff from now till the end of the year. That, in addition to creating new songs to keep up with all this old material.
It should be a fun distraction.