It’s a mask I made when I was a young teenager that was found in the attic again this summer, so I decided to re-use it this year as one of my hallowe’en costumes.
Month: October 2010
Videos uploaded
Added some videos to my youtube page over the last few days. Nothing that you won’t have heard already on my soundcloud page, or via this website, but some people prefer youtube, so I’m starting to use my account there a bit more.
youtube playlist with a number of my songs and performances
My First True Love (demo)
This song was written at the same time as Helen (don’t make a sound) back in 2007 sometime. Both songs were inspired by novels I’d read or recently read at the time. I’ve noted previously that I tend to work on songs in batches of two or three at the same time. Sometimes an idea splits in three, sometimes I’ve loads of little ideas that start to link together resulting in some different songs. With this one, I was working with a really basic straight-forward chord progression, and I was trying to write something that was musically quite simple and direct. Perhaps because the other song I was working on at the same time was the opposite of that.
I’ve never been so sure of this song, but I like some parts of it. I guess I’ve been playing it so long that I’m just used to it. One of my old housemates surprised me one day by saying it was her favourite of my songs. I think I have a music-snob idea that because it’s simple it’s not as good as some of the more musically complex songs. I’ve managed to completely over complicate the piano line as a result though, and I definitely fuck it up in this demo. I’d go fix it up before posting it, but my piano has been out on loan all weekend, and when it comes back I’m gonna finish off the new demo I start for “is this what they call romance?” instead.
my first true love [demo]
my first true love [demo] by misterebby
(lyrics after the jump)
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Caoineadh (demo)
I’m not a fluent Irish speaker. I didn’t learn Irish very well in school either. Any Irish I do have came from the fact that I was friends with Irish speakers, and joined a youth theatre group at An Taibhdhearc, the National Irish Language Theatre of Ireland, based here in Galway. Thus I will apologise if the lyrics of this little song are examples of terrible Irish. :)
It is one of two songs that I have written that have Irish language lyrics – the other one just has one section of the song in Irish, and the rest of it is in English. Interestingly, I never set out to “write a song in Irish”, it just seemed to happen both times.
This one was written when I was working as a barman in Club Áras na nGael (the Irish language bar here in Galway) and obviously being surrounded by Irish on a daily basis had some kind of an impact. It is one of the things I love most about Galway – it’s the only city I’ve been in in Ireland where I’ve heard people casually using Irish in day-to-day situations, e.g. queuing for the banklink, or sitting at a table in a café, or talking to their kids walking down the street. As much as the language can appear to be integrated in a tokenistic manner in some parts of the country, here it doesn’t feel like that at all. It really does feel like it is a part of the city – a small part, sure, but a definite one.
It’s only a wee little song, and I never finished off the lyrics or really figured out in my head where it’s going, but I demo’d it again there in the last few weeks to get it on record so I could sit with it and really hear what I want to do to the song. So, I guess it’s a work in progress at the moment and we’ll see what happens with it.
In terms of writing it – the melody came first, and the words kinda slotted into place at one point when I was playing it at the piano. The song was written at the same time as Maria, and both started life as piano instrumentals. I may yet record instrumental versions of both songs, as I’ve half a notion to release a little record of just piano instrumentals.
Helen (don’t make a sound) demo
I wrote this way back when I was sharing a house with Anna and playing piano with her a lot in gigs and the like. At the time I was focusing more on other people’s music than on my own, but the house was a very music filled house, which was inspiring. I was working on music arrangements for a musical at the time too, which had me working on 4, 5 and 6 part vocal harmonies. We were also practising regularly, as well as just messing about with musical experiments. We were a tv-less house too, and evenings that weren’t musical evenings, were often spent reading, listening to music, drinking tea and or off out in one of the local pubs having a pint or three.
It was during this period that I really started back writing my own songs again after a few sporadic bursts of songwriting. There’s a cliché that heartbreak is what inspires songwriting, but for me, it was being in a relationship that gave me the inspiration to start writing again.
At one point, I got hooked on waltzes, and kept showing people how everything can be turned into a waltz, and it’s instantly cheese-tastic. We turned a regular cover that we used to perform, into a waltz half way through the song, just to play around with it. In the midst of this, I ended up writing two songs that were waltzes. Musically, this song draws inspiration from two specific songs that I reference musically in a quite vague sort of way. It doesn’t really matter what those two songs are, as the musical allusions are something that I’ll get but not many other people would even notice. Even if I pointed out the songs, you’d more than likely go “huh?” than anything else, as it’s filtered through my own musical language. I know what I’m referring to, but it might not make sense to you.
Anyways, lyrically, it was inspired by a book I read that was recommended to me by a friend online. I was a bit wary initially, but I got completely hooked on it, and it’s probably one of my favourite reading experiences of the last few years, as I got completely wrapped up in this book and somehow related so much to one of the characters that I ended up writing this song and borrowing that character for my own story inspired by that novel.
Musically, the two different sections came quite naturally from each other, but are quite unrelated. I liked the chromatic bass movement in the verses, and that was something I deliberately set out to achieve. The other section has a chord progression that is sorta similar to something else, but I wanted the chromatic bass movement to be the musical link between the two sections. I also decided that although the sections were in different keys, that I wouldn’t try and modulate neatly between them, but rather have an abrupt change to reflect the different states of mind and change in the song lyrically.
When I perform this song live in intimate venues, I try to get the audience to do the backing vocal lines in the “chorus” as whispers while I sing and play over it. I’m a fan of audience participation, and it’s something that makes me very happy when it works. Generally, it has worked better than expected, and audiences seem quite willing to humour a silly piano playing songwriter in his silly little whims. But it keeps me entertained, and that’s a good thing.
The demo is just that – a demo. I tried a few times to demo this song, and just kept fucking it up, to be honest. And while I certainly don’t ace the song in this recording either, it’s at least close enough to be a half decent reflection of what the song is supposed to be like. Just without the strings that I’ve written in my head, or the female vocal parts that I’ve used in live performances a few times, or really, anything other than just the piano line and my own vocals.
Helen (don’t make a sound) [demo] by misterebby
(photos are hosted on my flickr page)