Songwriting and sunny days

I’ve been quite lucky recently, as it’s been wet on the days I’ve been working, and sunny out the days I’ve had to myself at home. Earlier this week I had one of those perfect days where I had the house and garden to myself (except for the cat), and spent the day going from the piano to the garden, working on two of the newest songs I’ve been writing.

Honestly, there’s not much more enjoyable than spending a day like that. It was perfectly sunny, but not too warm, and my voice was in good shape. I’ve been noticing a progression in the sound and even the style of the songs I’ve been writing more recently, and there’s a noticeable difference between the newest songs and the other songs from the batch I wrote for Wires. There’s enough left over from that album to be nearly a full album themselves, but now I’ve written nearly as many as that again since then. I guess I need to sit with these songs a little while, and finish some of them off, and see others take shape a bit more and find the sound that they need.

I’ve tried out some of the newer songs live already this summer, and it’s always that moment when you really look at the song and start to see what you really think of it. With one of the songs I was working on this week, I had that panic moment where I worried that I was just re-writing someone else’s song with different words, that I was unconsciously ripping off a melody from somewhere else. That happens and always threatens to kill the song while you’re still writing it. Usually I just ignore it, and keep working on the song and see where it leads and how it ends up. This time I went and listened to the song that I thought I was unconsciously ripping off, and felt the relief when I saw just how different the two works are.

I’ve another song sitting waiting to be written at the moment. There’s a little glimmer of an idea about it that I like, but the rest is sitting waiting as I’m not entirely happy with what I’ve got so far. It’ll sit in the back of my mind while I work on other things, and we’ll see how it works out.

Incidentally, one of the newest songs is possibly one of the most “pop song” like songs I’ve ever written. But I really like it.

I need a drummer.

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