National Solo Album Month, or NaSoAlMo, has its own site now, but you can’t find it doing a Google search for "nasoalmo". ("nasoalmo 2006 works, though.)
Writing begins on Nov. 1, 2006 and ends on Nov. 30, 2006, just like National Novel Writing Month.
I’m not under shinkyoku moratorium this year, so I just may participate alongside the event.
I signed up for TiVo back in late July, and in the last two months, I’ve been diving into the wild and frustrating world of digital video — all because I just wanted to edit out the commercials from my downloaded TiVo files.
My, how long we’ve come from taping off from live TV and pausing the tape during commercial breaks.
After a month of fiddling with various and sundry software, I started developing the notion that perhaps I can use these burgeoning video skills for something more ambitious.
Like, say, a music video. For Eponymous 4.
Well, I just got back from a nighttime drive where I took my digital point-and-shoot camera and recorded six minutes of video. I put the camera on the dash, headed straight for the freeway and drove.
I could do something like draw a storyboard or something, but I think I’ll do this thing guerilla-style. I’m just going to shoot, shoot, shoot and see if I can make heads or tails of with what I end up.
I may need some larger flash memory cards.
I updated and reformatted this list. I was going to change the original publication date so that it would get bumped up in the RSS feed, but I don’t feel comfortable revising history too much.
I briefly considered turning that entire table into some dynamically-generated database thing, but my mind followed that line of thinking to its natural conclusion — a lot of development time spent on something that could very well derail the pace of the recording sessions.
Too, I don’t think the data I’d provide such an interface would be terribly meaningful or accurate. After 20 years, I’m hazy about when I wrote what in the Binder. I’m terribly with labeling my stuff with dates. I’m not exactly certain when I finished songs I wrote even a year ago.
It’s not like songwriting is a task-oriented process. An idea for something might be sketched out one day and not see actual completion till years later.
But even jotting down basic info should be enough to keep track of things. My goal is eventually to stop raiding my archives. There’s a lot of stuff in there, though.
I put all the files on that list into Winamp to glean some statistics.
I have this vague notion that I would start seriously considering playing this music live once I have four hours worth of material completed. That’s at least another EP’s worth of work.
Frank Black attempted to write some Pixie-esque songs as a proof-of concept exercise, so says Billboard. He was trying to convince a reluctant Pixies member to record a new album with the band.
Then he discovered he wasn’t all that into writing in a style he used 20 years ago.
I’m trying to do that now.
I’ve been digging through the Binder — a collection of manuscripts of songs I wrote back in high school — and I’ve been extensively revising some of those songs as a way to augment a new version of A Ghost in My Shadow.
The arm of Duran Duran and Arcadia is long, and it stretched into my hand as I penned a goodly number of these early songs. I’m listening to So Red the Rose right now to get me in that same mind frame.
But where Frank Black chose wisely to bag those newly-minted Pixie-esque songs, I am continuing down my mistaken path. I’m not sure what I’m going to uncover by doing so. I’m not sure how it will inform my writing, if at all.
But I’m not terribly afraid of going down creative dead-ends. I’m rather scientific about it, really — this kind of exercise may not produce good work, but it does produce more data.
So far, I’ve managed to take the first song I ever wrote — pompously titled "Untold Demons" — and revised to the point where I’m suprised, impressed even, by how it turned out.
I looked to Cocco’s "Yawaraka na Kizuato" to transform another early song to something quite different.
I’m still on the fence about this rip-off of Arcadia’s "El Diablo" I worked on this past weekend. On one hand, I really like the melody. On the other hand, it’s so "Save a Prayer".
There’s another song that ripped off "Winter Marches On", but I’m going to turn that more into Sinéad O’Connor’s "Just Like U Said It Would B". And there’s a rip-off of "The Promise", which will be the Duran Duran clusterfuck of clusterfucks.
Come to think of it, I’m actually having some fun.
But if I could play favorites with my "children", A Ghost in My Shadow would still be considered the black sheep.
Some gimmicks …
After considering whether the Sequentia from the Requiem mass could serve as a separate piece, I thought the kind of music possibly best suited for the fire and brimstone text would be post-rock. I’m talking Explosions in the Sky, mono, Eluvium, whoever is on the Temporary Residence label. Most of that music is instrumental, so it’ll be interesting for me to adapt vocals to it.
Remember the idea for a religious album? That’s what Requiem is going to be. (Odd that I titled that entry "Christian Burial Music".) I also took baby steps in the pillaging of A Ghost In My Shadow. I created a folder in my Cakewalk working directory for A Ghost In My Shadow 2.0. I’m still working out what will go where.
I wrote a lyric this morning — which I’ve posted — and I didn’t feel like giving it an English title. So I went with Japanese instead. It occurred to me a common practice with Japanese songwriters is to use English titles, even when they’re singing in Japanese. Why can’t it work the other way around? As such, I’ll title songs for this lyrics-first project in Japanese. I can’t seem to find a really appropriate translation for "What I Deserve", but "The Speed of Light" is now 「光速」, while 「光がない」 remains 「光がない」.
The first line of this lyric came about because I was bored at work and thought, "Hey, maybe I’ll work on my lyrics here at the office." I immediately dismissed the idea and put it in the form of a lyric.
Then I took it from there.
今
May 29, 2006
This is not the place for me to write my feelings down
This is not the time for me to say unspoken thoughts
This is not the moment when I tell you what I think
This is not the way I’d tell you why
When is the right time?
I don’t owe you anything, not even simple truths
I won’t mention anything you don’t already know
I can’t tell you how to feel about what’s there inside
I don’t even know what’s there myself
Is this the right time?
Tell me the right time
This will never be the place for me to tell the truth
This will never be the time for me to say the word
So what’s the point in waiting for a moment that won’t come?
Now is just a good a time as any
When is the right time?
Now is the right time
Is this right time?
This is the right time
I think I may have managed to write music for "What I Deserve", officially making it the first new song I’ve written in 2006.
This small but significant development makes me think I could pull off this notion of writing lyrics first before music. I must, however, confess to "borrowing" a melodic lick from Damien Jurado and Gathered in Song for this track.
And just because I have this thing for titles starting with "Re-", I’m fishing out the pop music requiem mass I wrote back in high school and updating it. Oh, please — don’t make me talk about it. It’s embarrassing. Let’s just say I did it in the throes of my Enya and Andrew Lloyd Webber fascination.
So Requiem is going to be a future Eponymous 4 project. The original Introit and Kyrie was modeled too closely to Enya’s "Portrait", so I bashed something out last night. My post-college writing is vastly different from my pre-college writing. I wouldn’t have had the sense to pluck out a chord progression on a chromatically descending bass line in my junior year of high school. For the revised Introit, that was my first instinct.
I will have to trash the Offertorium. I fit the syllables of the Latin text to the melody pf a rock tune without any concern for the actual cadence of the phrases, so it all sounds really awkward. What the hell did I know at the time? I didn’t even perform a Requiem till college.
I’m thinking the music for the Offertorium that’s already written could use some nice Japanese lyrics.
I originally modeled the high school-era requiem after the Andrew Lloyd Webber text, which includes a Dies Irae. The updated requiem will be modeled after the ones written by Gabriel Fauré and Maurice Duruflé. No Dies Irae. But I wonder if the Dies Irae could make a feasible separate piece?
It’ll be interesting to see how I can resolve writing from 20 years ago with writing today.
First, a declaration — I have no plans to write any of the plots I describe in this entry.
I am going to concentrate on songwriting, since it’s something I’ve done for far longer than fiction writing. I’m also formally trained to write music, whereas I can barely read novels nowadays.
I’ve put a lid on my literary aspirations. I’ll pursue them when the songwriting well runs dry. (Although, chances are, if that well dries up, so would the literary well.)
Regardless, I still want to update this entry. A few weeks ago, I thought I don’t have any new stories in me, no new plots to develop. That’s not quite the case.
Most of these ideas are embryonic, but at least they’re there. I’d be in worse shape if I had no ideas at all.
I’m copying directly from the old entry. Onward …
The "gay twist" in television crime dramas isn’t the scandal it was as recently as 15 years ago. (Check out some of the gay-themed Law & Order episodes from the early seasons.)
I don’t watch Without a Trace, but I have caught about three episodes of the show in the past few years. In one episode, I could see the gay twist coming from a mile away. A Korean store clerk went missing, and the cops look at the ex-fiance, who turns out to be gay.
This past weekend, I saw another episode in which teenagers in a suburb have orgies without their parents’ knowledge. I thought I could see a gay twist coming, but it didn’t arrive. The subtext could have been played that way, though.
Still, it got me thinking about a teen drama. Here’s my pitch.
I won’t go into what inspired this lyric because it’s silly. But if you’re a regular reader of the journal, I can tell you the background because you’ll have known about it.
I said I was going to write lyrics before I write music for my next project, so I better start making good on that.
I’m ripping off Kelley Willis’ title, but the sentiment of my song is vastly different from hers.