Well, the 18th of December 2007 is a day to be remembered, at least for myself anyway. It is the day I finished recording what could be described as a miniature EP. You could also describe it as a pretty slickly recorded demo, but I think mini EP seems a better descriptor. For the past month and a half I’ve been doing some recording with my old friend James North of James North Productions in his boutique studio in St Lucia. I came in the three and a ½ songs, and ended up with four, the last of which I wrote in two hours on the day before, and recorded in about one hour yesterday. James was a bit of a legend and played most of the instruments on all the songs – extra guitars, keys, bass, drums and percussion and most importantly, hand claps. He also provided some great advice with regards to structure, what worked and didn’t work, and also the extra little bits that make a song special. The result is something that sounds great and that I’d be proud to give to my friends. James just has to go back and have a look at the final mix, before sending them off to be mastered, and then I’ll be releasing them on iTunes (to the general public), but also limited release on compact disc with artwork done primarily by myself – though this all depends on how much funds I have available for printing. I’ll probably give a lot of these away, so if you’re keen for a copy, drop us a line (also, a plug for james, if you’re thinking of getting some songs recorded, check his studio out). Low quality sample of the recordings will be available at my myspace sometime in January 2008.
I suppose this brings me to another topic regarding the songwriting process. Personally, I’m fairly conscious of my songwriting – for some people, I guess, they have the knack, but for most, it is bloody hard work. In my own personal opinion, songwriting is like anything else, you only get better at it by constantly doing it. I particularly struggle with lyrics – I’m never entirely happy with the completed words (in fact, unless a song ends up sounding like a song that perhaps Stephin Merrit or the Shins would think was good, or at least adequate, I don’t think I’ll ever be happy). There does come a point where you just have to ’sit-down, shut-up’ and go with the words you’ve spent hours/weeks/months arranging on a page. And occasionally it will take this long – years even, but I think some great songs can be completed in as little as a day (The Magnetic Fields song “Book of Love was allegedly written in a day). I constantly strive to be so proficient.
Often I am inspired by this great Theodore Roosevelt quote, which he gave in 1910 at the Sorbonne in Paris (which coincidently, forms the ‘tag-line’ of this blog), a quote in which he gave justified the art of trying.
“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
Well, doesn’t that sound all dandy then.
In other news, Okkervil river have a whole album of covers available for download for free off their website for a presumably limited time. Go get it at their website.
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