A Song from the Attic (2)

A week or two ago I told you about the old diary I found at the attic - and now I'm getting back to it because it makes me believe I'm insane. When I picked it up again yesterday a new entry had appeared out of nowhere... someone's still writing in it! Is it a ghost of times long past? Only if 'recording software' once had a meaning different from what we know today... piecing together parts of the puzzle. Although I feel this ghost is benign it definitely has some unfinished business to attend to! Read with me:

So I did finally get to sleep after recording my little improvisational session in the middle of the night. Now, the morning after the birth of a song, I wake up wondering if what I have created is any good at all! This is when I get critical and judgemental; this is when the real work begins.

I open up my recording software to retrieve my last piece of creation and while looking at the piano track on the screen, I remember - oh yeah, this is 15 minutes long! Yikes!! That is way too long for a song, unless we’re talking about Led Zeppelin of course. So what I attempt to do is go through the recording and see what parts I want to keep and what parts can be canned in order to make something that somewhat resembles a modern song structure. This is where some self doubt, combined with the ego’s desires, tries to make it’s way in. Is this good enough? Can I really make a song worth listening to out of this? Will people like it?

I try to calm the voices in my head and get to work. I take the track and start cutting it up and changing the sequence of sections or repeating certain passages with a little copy and paste. This of course, is just to give an idea of what order the music will be in. The next part will be arranging the music and re-recording the whole thing plus adding layers if I decide to do so.

What about a text? Well, if I listen carefully to the soft notes that sometimes came out of my low volume voice in the recording, I can make out words and sometimes phrases: “All the pretty places are calling me. I want more than their faces; I want to dive deep”. Well, it’s not much, but it’s a start! There are a few more words that I can make out. Let’s see what else I can find here and then add some more to make a storyline. I feel a title coming on… yep. There is definitely a title in there. So the song shall be called,… (AA)