The Sound and the Fury and Norman Collier.
So I've been singing today. I've remembered why I don't do this any more. Its stressful.
I'm in a little box room. Its boiling hot but the windows are closed because the neighbour is in the garden sunning himself on a lilo. I have hot wet ears beneath my head-phones and I dread to think what sort of teeming ear fauna is being birthed inside them. I have a slight deafness in my left ear too: intermittent and gummy. My throat is dry and I'm clearing it every five seconds, like a petulant Englishmen struggling to get good service. Yesterday I was in sweet and powerful voice. Today I sound like a cow with a thirty a day habit.
I have backing tracks on a CD and a laptop with both a CD tray and a headphone socket - rare enough these days -so that bit works at least. The recording equipment I'm running through another laptop where for the first twenty minutes the software refuses to respond to my touch. When it does work the microphone randomly cuts out, lending the work a Norman Collier Live! feel.
He was a comedian in the 70's and 80's. If you're that fussed about getting the reference why not Google him: it would take five minutes.
See, I told you I was in a bad mood.
Then there's the physical act of singing. I'm out of practice. I sing a lot around the house because I am so jolly, but these are new words to new music. They haven't been formed properly, the oral ergonomics are all wrong: they haven't been smoothed and rounded out by being in a mouth. Songs are like Toblerone - you need to smooth down the pointy bits by sticking them in your gob. Sometimes lines don't work: the stresses may be off, they may not shuttle smoothly into the next line: there maybe end-of-phrase-shunting*, which jars and sounds clumsy to the ear. I have practised these songs, a bit. But they're not "performance honed". This recording is the performance. This is when they have to be finished.
Also, the songs are GOOD. So I don't want to fuck them up. I want them to be sung as well as I can . I edge round them, finding better ways to sing them, trying to pack the performance with detail and passion while still keeping the words legible. They're good words - I wrote them.
I sing them again and again, deleting the faulty versions each time, destroying each mistimed line every stumble where I couldn't read my own handwriting. I'm getting hotter, sweatier - I do a near perfect take and the microphone stops working. I do it again. My voice is getting hoarse. The gravel is useful at times but there are other times where I need a pure tone. I try to stick a lot in. Like I say it has to be good.
I complete two songs. Actually I complete one song and a bit of another - there's a middle-eight I don't have any words for yet. But its started. One song sung. I can send it off to my co-conspirator.
Who will probably make me do them again. But it begins.
*these are technical terms.
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| Of course I ruined my glasses in the end... |
I'm in a little box room. Its boiling hot but the windows are closed because the neighbour is in the garden sunning himself on a lilo. I have hot wet ears beneath my head-phones and I dread to think what sort of teeming ear fauna is being birthed inside them. I have a slight deafness in my left ear too: intermittent and gummy. My throat is dry and I'm clearing it every five seconds, like a petulant Englishmen struggling to get good service. Yesterday I was in sweet and powerful voice. Today I sound like a cow with a thirty a day habit.
I have backing tracks on a CD and a laptop with both a CD tray and a headphone socket - rare enough these days -so that bit works at least. The recording equipment I'm running through another laptop where for the first twenty minutes the software refuses to respond to my touch. When it does work the microphone randomly cuts out, lending the work a Norman Collier Live! feel.
He was a comedian in the 70's and 80's. If you're that fussed about getting the reference why not Google him: it would take five minutes.
See, I told you I was in a bad mood.
Then there's the physical act of singing. I'm out of practice. I sing a lot around the house because I am so jolly, but these are new words to new music. They haven't been formed properly, the oral ergonomics are all wrong: they haven't been smoothed and rounded out by being in a mouth. Songs are like Toblerone - you need to smooth down the pointy bits by sticking them in your gob. Sometimes lines don't work: the stresses may be off, they may not shuttle smoothly into the next line: there maybe end-of-phrase-shunting*, which jars and sounds clumsy to the ear. I have practised these songs, a bit. But they're not "performance honed". This recording is the performance. This is when they have to be finished.
Also, the songs are GOOD. So I don't want to fuck them up. I want them to be sung as well as I can . I edge round them, finding better ways to sing them, trying to pack the performance with detail and passion while still keeping the words legible. They're good words - I wrote them.
I sing them again and again, deleting the faulty versions each time, destroying each mistimed line every stumble where I couldn't read my own handwriting. I'm getting hotter, sweatier - I do a near perfect take and the microphone stops working. I do it again. My voice is getting hoarse. The gravel is useful at times but there are other times where I need a pure tone. I try to stick a lot in. Like I say it has to be good.
I complete two songs. Actually I complete one song and a bit of another - there's a middle-eight I don't have any words for yet. But its started. One song sung. I can send it off to my co-conspirator.
Who will probably make me do them again. But it begins.
*these are technical terms.
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