Rough to Release

 Welcome to either the half-way point of this blog, or the end of the blog, depending on your perspective... This series is titled 'rough to release' because for me, the release is the end* of the process. It's the point beyond which there are no more re-writes, re-arrangements or just general tweakery. In releasing it to the public it is committed to the record. But not all of you will work to this definition of 'finished'. For some it is enough to have a set of lyrics written down, a structure established, and a chord progression or tune notated. And if that's you then you might be pleased to know that your work here is all but done. After this blog we'll be moving onto the 'release' part of the series. So before we take that step, let's have a quick refresher on what we've covered so far. In part one we set the scene but didn't really broach any finishing techniques, so let's go straight onto... Part Two - Space and Permission. Th...

  Obviously not every song is a love song, but the same principles we discussed last time apply. Take the spark and add narrative spice. In A Prologue , I have a song that features a killer on a journey to dispose of a dead body in the back seat of his car. Ok, that's an idea, but I like to think it becomes interesting by adding the spice that the killer has no memory of how this morbid situation came to pass.   An easy way of finding a bit of spice to add to a song is to grab that folder of notes, or stack of videos and grab a couple of examples at random. Maybe one idea is a riff on train travel and the other idea is about gardening. Great, how could you combine them into something that fires the imagination? What about looking out of a train window and seeing how a garden changes over the seasons? Ok, that gives us a nice time-passing idea. What else is in the folder? Perhaps it's a rant about quitting work. Fine, that gives us the impetus for change. Is it a song a...

  Wherein we actually talk about songwriting. Let's start with the concept of Spark and Spice. Spark is the idea behind the song. Pop music has traditionally been very frugal with the range of ideas that achieve widespread acceptance. Boy/girl meets boy/girl. Boy/girl loses boy/girl. Boy/girl has unrequited love for boy/girl. Etc etc. I mean, obviously there are other themes in popular music, and certain acts definitely had a much broader range of stories to tell, from the Beatles, to They Might Be Giants, to Radiohead. But take a quick look at the charts and do a count up of the proportion of tracks that are, shall we say, relationship-based. And yet, there are thousands of brilliant songs out there that somehow manage to mine this same vein and still extract new nuggets of gold. How does that work? Well that's where the spice comes in. If spark is the idea, spice is how you turn that into something interesting. And if you're familiar with the old idea that the...