Old Stuff That’s Actually Quite Awesome
So today I was looking for an old piece of music amongst my many unorganised folders of music sessions everywhere. This is when I found quite a dated piece – a song that I wrote when I was mainly just writing instrumentals because I still wasn’t confident enough in my singing. Now the thing is I remember exactly why I gave up on this song – it was random, not complete, all over the place and just didn’t make any sense. However, since I wrote that song my music has in fact being pushed towards matching that exact style (That’s right, I make music that’s not complete, random, all over the place and that doesn’t make sense hehe). I listened through the song today and just couldn’t believe my ears, why did I ever ditch this song?
Its true that its a good idea to leave things and come back to them, hell even leaving a blog post and coming back to it the next day makes you see heaps of errors in your writing. Most of all my songs that I’ve left and come back to have made me face palm when I listen to them again. Except this song. So today I built on it, went crazy, and it was terrific (I bet you tomorrow I wake up, listen to it and think – oh god, why did I blog about this? this is song is horrid).
And you know what? I’m actually going to put it on the album. Yep. There’s been songs that I’ve worked on for about 8 times the amount as this one, but hey, I guess that’s just how the cookie crumbles.
Oh, and to be a jerk, I’m not going to attach the whole song, in fact just attach an excerpt. The song title will be named “Flint’s Adventures In A Rather Dangerous Land”. This is dedicated to my soft toy giraffe friend Flint, who has unfortunately been adopted by me, and has been the only witness to all my rather frustrating, enjoyable and downright crazy bedroom studio sessions. Sometimes I feel that Flint would miss his friends back at the soft toy store. So Flint, this song if for you!
Flint’s Adventures In A Rather Dangerous World
That Damn Last Song
So lately I’ve been trying to organise my songs and work out which order I want them to be on the album. This has become quite a frustrating process. I’ve already got my first track sorted out, which is cool. But finding a track to put on the end of the album is starting to annoy me.
You want the last track on the album to leave the listener on a good note, make them feel like the album is complete. The thing is, I’ve had a shortlist of songs I could put on the end of my album, but when I work on them for too long I decide that the song deserves to be higher up on the list – obviously being the last track the percentage of listeners actually listening to the song would be quite low in comparison to say my first 3-5 songs. Headache!
Anyway, to clear my head I went in search of albums I like that have a great closing track. Here’s my top ten:
Public Enemies
I went and saw this film last night. Things were all going well – it was a rainy evening, I had a sufficient supply of snacks and I was in good company.
The thing about this film is that – well with a cast like Johnny Depp, Christian Bale and Marion Cotillard I think the hype for this film was a little over the top. Especially since every tram, street and cinema pushed the life-size cut out of DEPP in your face. THIS FILM HAS JOHNNY DEPP IN IT, YOU MUST WATCH.
The film was good, not bad, not great. It was entertainment – a popcorn flick. The dialogue was pretty lame in most parts – however for me this was the best bit of the movie. I couldn’t stop laughing everytime Christian Bale pulled out some huge piece of dialogue in his tangy American accent.
The action scenes where meh. All the bank robberies were the same, and there was quite a large scene in the middle of the film; which after 5 mins of crazy angles and guns firing everywhere I found myself thinking about what I was going to get done on the weekend and then realised I was watching a Johnny Depp film. One of my friends asked me ‘Was this movie filmed in digital with a handycam?’.
In general, I’m sick of action films having this kinda rapid camera changing stuff during action. You can’t see shit, have no idea whats going on and end up drinking half your large coke just to handle the nausea. I wonder what the difference of cuts was between say this film and No Country for Old men.
If you’ve got a bowl of popcorn, good company and wanna have a few laughs then go check it out, if you’ve got expectations that this film is going to be film of the year then don’t waste your money.
Have fun
Black Moth Super Rainbow
These guys are pretty cool, haven’t heard them before. My girlfriend showed me this film clip and its actually really kinda creepy, but well done all the same. I enjoy their style of music and most of the songs on their cd goes for less then a couple of minutes which is cool – it goes all over the place but the drums are consistent and keeps the groove together.
Highway 61 Revisited
This album has really grown on me during the past few weeks, it’s got to the stage where I almost prefer every song on it over “Like a Rolling Stone” (Madness!).
Still, the thing about this album that really draws me to it is the fact that it just sounds so raw – but in a good way. These days so much music is made to the best standards, using the best gear, and the best sound engineers (not me!). But this album sounds makes you feel like you were standing in the studio listening to them record in one take. In fact that reminds me – I heard during an interview with the Rolling Stones that they could only afford limited hours in the studio – so therefore they just smashed the song over in about an hour and just left it at that and went on with it.
Now days with people recording in their homes, like myself, we have this timeless period where mistakes such as a small lapse in time or an 90 percent guitar riff, starts to haunt you until it gets to the stage where you end up punching a wall cause you realised that the first recording of the guitar riff was better than your 50th.
Well, that’s just a thought or too, Highway 61 Revisited rocks – go listen to it, your father will appreciate you more.