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)
