I Sing the Body Eccentric

 I write songs. I've always written songs. Since I was about fifteen or so. It was cool then. It's not cool now. But I don't want to stop. I like it, you see. Some people do Sudokus or crosswords or play "Frustration" with the popamatic dice. I don't play games as a) I'm not good at them b) what's the point? I find no satisfaction in solving unnecessary problems. My life is chock-a-bloc with insoluble personal crises of my own manufacture - I don't need to add to the pile for giggles. 

But writing a song is a bit like a game for me. I don't usually write the music, so I'm presented with a series of noises that I have to turn into a recognisible song. Oftentimes, it's easy - I work with people who have good ideas and, crucially, can play actual musical instruments. On other occasions I'll ask for a scratch idea - something basic, half-formed. I find it easier to find a melodic top-line if I can hear the mechanics of the music. I like to look at the bare bones and slap my musical meat on it. If that's a thing. It's fun. Like sculpture. It must be different if you're the author of the whole thing. I often think that my songwriting is too conservative: a slave to the versechorusmiddleeight hegemony. I see myself as bringing order to chaos - finding the conciliatory voice in the noise. I am holding your hand and guiding you through an alien landscape. I'm lucky enough to write with someone whose ideas are far more interesting than mine, and furthermore they control the mix. Our songs are not dull. They have been described, in fact, as mental. Which I'm sure makes us both proud. I also think I'm getting better at this lark, which is counter-intuitive - the best people at it are supposed to be dead before they're thirty. 

That's old fashioned thinking. Pop music, rock music is only really ten or fifteen years older than I am. Some - a few - of its earliest practitioners are still alive. And there are flipping loads of British Invasion wrinklies still bothering the pages of Mojo magazine, endorsing Brexit and re-releasing venerable material in a series of definitive this-time-its-for-keeps-honest iterations. They also produce new records. So do the generations that came after them, wave upon wave, crashing and hissing at our elderly pop-kids. There's still an audience for this music. It's just that to all intents and purposes its not a youth culture. It's a weird, old distended form of music, charting unexplored waters - what happens when a youth culture gets old? Can these performers still be good? Can they still do useful, interesting work. I believe they can. But then I have a vested interest in that belief. 

There is a school of thought that suggests Poprock - which I'm insisting on calling it - died with Band Aid, but that means every band I've been in has been a sort of post modern confection, sifting through the rubble of a collapsed empire. I'm not unsympathetic to the idea. That's certainly the way I write MY songs. The pop charts - if they're still called that - are, I assume, full of music. But it is a different kind of music for a different kind of people. I'm sure "rock" is laughable to them. Even if, anecdotally, some of your kids play Oasis songs and wear a parka. 

I've only ever really written songs for me to sing. That's not quite true - the songs I write for The Charlemagnes are written for Marty to sing. But I don't write the melody, just the words. He fashions them into tunes. Traditionally if I'm writing a song it's for my voice, and tailored to the sort of things I can do with my voice, and the sort of things I want to do with it, which is quite different. I know my breathing, my range, my lumbering delivery, the "width" of my voice - it takes up a lot of room. I know the shape of songs, where things need to land, how a chorus must be its own story within the song, how the middle-eight is a new character introduced into the narrative. There is, tediously, craft involved. It's like trying to build a workable coffee table. 

Recently, I have been singing on a couple of songs I haven't written. They were written by someone with a very different voice, and different ideas about how things work. Their melodies are are not the melodies I would instinctively write. They use a lot of words. Their verses are long, the choruses longer still, and complicated. It's been interesting. What comes out is not how I would deliver one of my own songs but, equally, not quite what they intended. I add to it. There's a point to my singing it. It doesn't sound like what either of us would do on our own. It's an interesting blend. 

https://citycentrecarparks.bandcamp.com/track/the-rupture

I have also written a lyric and a melody in return. When they sing the words, when they do the tune, they don't do it like I would do it - they add bits, they seem to have more room to maneuver, the verses seem like endless tracts. They have so much more time than I do. When I was doing the guide I was spitting out the lyrics. Their version is languid, with the melancholy of the lotus eater, warm and expansive on the lilo, as they bump into the side of the pool spilling their drinks into the chlorinated blue. It's a different song. I really like it. 

So I keep writing songs. I can't help myself.