Yup. It's hard to know what to write about sometimes and at others it seems unbearably obvious when one isn't within reach of a computer (and I've refused to attempt to write a blog using my phone thus far). Now I'm afraid returning after an unintended hiatus I'm going to mess with the mood and consistency of the whole thing - of course I know that fear is a pretty meaningless one, particularily considering what a small readership I have!
Nonetheless I'd like to talk a little about the band (how it's going) and song-writing, as I'm going through a little bit of a what could ostensibly be described as a lyrical dry patch. Actually it is more a sort of indecisiveness than actually dryness, I'm happily churning out riffs, melodies and chord patterns but I've been unwilling to committ to subjects or specific lyrics.
The band has been rehearsing the same songs two days a week for the last two and a half months since we got involved with some management at the very end of last year. Later this month we'll be going into Oscillate Recordings to cut some live demo versions. These songs are the same ones we've been playing for a couple of years and they all come from the album we've attempted to record twice (with slightly different track listings) but have yet to release (any of it!). In some ways it feels a bit like two steps forward one step back, but I am much happier with how the tracks are sounding that at any point in the last 3 years since little old me as 'Adam Kidd'became 'Adam Kidd Band' and we started to take it a little bit more seriously!
Don't get excited about this though, for these recordings, I've been told, are never to see the light of day either! They are simply demo sketches for our producer-to-be, so he can work out what production needs doing presumably. So after this batch of demos we get to record some of those songs again and hopefully these will be the golden ones that are good enough for the general public, some come back to me in a couple of months!!
This constant playing of the same 6-9 songs has just started to develop into frustration for the band and it bubbled over in our last rehearsal when Tom Alty led a revolt and played Toto's Hold The Line for the first time in quite a few months. A bit of a release but not really satisfying my own desire to try out a whole bunch of the last batch of songs I've written. I had a very fertile stream of song-writing toward the end of 2010, just as things were looking quiet for the band... I wrote and made demos for a whole suite of songs with lyrics which told dark stories, some of them based on real life events from the media.
These songs probably relate back to I Won't Tell If You Won't (a song that's dropped out of our repetoire now, but was always a standard in the early days of this project) which is a song that contains a story about a guy who discovers his girlfriend is a serial killer, killing off his rivals for him without him knowing it, having discovered what she's doing he's left with the dilemma of whether to help her cover it up or not. This song was pure fantasy, the whole story emerged as I searched for words to disguise the original thrust of the song, which had some vague notions about secrets and fortune in a relationship of mine that had ended. Empty Head, the latest track to be included in our current repetoire, is in some senses the descendant of IWTIYW, this time the fantasy is not as distant from the true story behind the song, I've merely fictionalised and exagerrated characters from real life to create a narrative.
The dark fantasy themes of these two songs led to an entire batch of new songs with lyrics following a similar vein, easily devided into two camps - songs that are fictions built around (or replacing) my experiences and songs that tell other peoples stories. The first camp includes She Makes Me Nervous, The Balancing Act, The End Of The World (For Two), Stowaways and A Stumbling Block and the other camp includes songs like Peter Wallner (about Mr. Wallner who murdered his wife), Dear Michael (about Michael Gilbert, who was kept captive and later murdered) and Down in the Basement (about Josef Fritzl and his family).
I suppose this desire to hide myself in my songs is a natural impulse, an attempt to avoid the bleeding heart miserabilism or (overblown romanticism) of most singer-songwriters. However some recent discussion and more informed opinions about my material have left my head full of musings, which are probably the principle cause for my unwillingness to settle on words right now. I was recently discussing my song Slow Down with a couple of different people on my team and it has been suggested I remove the word 'drinking' from the song, as it is too obvious... it anchors the song to a meaning, it reduces the potential abstract interpretations people can make for themselves by telling them 'this is a drinking song'... funnily enough I think the melody first hit me thinking about how drivers on quiet roads late at night can ignore pedestrians and zip around without considering how dangerous that could be.
The fact is I have often held back from saying something definitive and I think this is an excellent device for allowing a song to be reinterpreted by the audience, so I'm giving some serious consideration to dropping the word... quite a big thing for me (and it won't happen if the song feels disjointed without it). It's also started to make me consider this batch of tracks that actually describe a macabre news story, with accurate information coupled within my own imagined emotional context, and wonder if there is too much truth in those songs. I've actually had some really strong reactions to the song about Fritzl, several people (including band mates) have suggested or asked me not to explain what the song is about before I perform it (perhaps so people can judge it on it's musical merits), I've had people turn their nose up at it and I've had people tell me what a great tribute to Fritzl's long suffering daughter my lyric was.
Now I'm uncertain about it, is it too big a subject. At the time I wrote thiese songs because I spent a lot of time reading news stories in my boring job and these tales had gripped me - they had filled me with a sort of creeping horror, Michael Gilbert's sad story brought tears to my eyes on more than one occasion with pity for that poor man, whereas what really interested me about Fritzl and Wallner were the men themselves, what had happened to their humantiy to make them act so cruelly, with such detachment?
I have two songs desperate for words right now, there's a song Aaron and I have been co-writing, which we see as our sequel to Into The Night - it's got pop credentials aplenty but I am struggling to make a decision on lyrical approaches. At first I was thinking about writing it about being persued for money by companies (in my case Brighton Uni after unexpected tuition fees and various credit cards and loans I've been trying to pay back since being armed with them as a foolish late-teen) but I've also been thinking about writing a fiction about Britain after the Roman withdrawal to pin the words to.
The other song is a dreamy number and I've been thinking about writing it about a sort of legacy paranoia - a fear of what will be left behind when we are dead and how that will be interpreted by future generations. I want to marry this idea with an abstract notion... comparing the way that dreams are made up of fragments of our lives that return to us in sleep to archeology and how our image of these people is constructed from a similar jumble of fragments... the past is constantly changing, so how can the future ever be certain?
Anyhoo - that's enough rambling for now, suffice to say I've a lot on my mind and plenty of songs left to write!! If you follow what I do you may want to take this opportunity to make sure you've grabbed all the downloads from my reverbnation page as I think I'm going to be stripping back our public face even further after the weekend... it's time to loose those old sketches, so if you've not downloaded them yet now's the time: http://reverbnation.com/adamkidd
Until next time,
Adam.x
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