Have you ever wondered where songs come from?
Welcome to 2011: they come from my mobile phone. At least, that’s where the songs we’ll be talking about in this blogfermented. Some became stronger, more purified and lean. Others turned to mushy mulch, wet and stinking, straight from the bottom of a compost heap.
I play the guitar at home quite a lot. Sometimes I’ll be noodling away and an idea will just fall into my head all by itself – a guitar riff, a lyric idea, a special effect that I think would be cool in a song, even just a feeling that I want to try to capture in music. And when that happens, I know I’ll forget it totally within minutes. It’s a race against time to catch it before it vanishes forever. So out comes my mobile, with its handy voice record function. I bet your phone has one too, have you ever used it? I use mine almost every day. If it weren’t for mobiles, I’d have to carry a Dictaphone round like a rogue reporter who’s never had a scoop in his whole career. I record the idea, be it 10 seconds or two minutes. Then, safe in the knowledge that the idea is safe in my phone, I forget about it. Having an idea is much easier than finishing a song – ideas are always great because of their potential. Songs are crap because you haven’t lived up to that potential.
I’ve been working like that for about 5 years. A few months ago I decided to sort through the recordings I had and try to turn the best ones into songs. Only one snag: there were 1,500 of these buggers: little snippets of the embryos that would one day grow up to be music. Oh, crap, ah’m gonna be a daddy!
But I’m nothing if not industrious (read: stupidly obsessed) so I listened to them all. I was really harsh – if I didn’t think what I was hearing was special in some way, and had potential to be a song, I’d delete it. Sometimes I’d hear an idea recorded years ago, then recorded again much more recently, with different words or a slightly different hook. Sometimes the same idea would be a recurring theme in loads of different recordings. Often I’d hear an idea that had since become part of another finished song. It took about 5 days, but eventually I had 300 ideas that I felt might, with a bit of hard work, inspiration and luck, become finished songs that didn’t totally suck.
How do 300 sound clips, probably averaging 20 seconds long, turn into the basis for a Captain Horizon album? Ideas are only one ingredient, and they’re easy – anyone can have an idea. Turning it into something good is the hard bit.
For me, the second ingredient was something very bitter indeed. The week I finished sorting through the clips, me and my workmates were called into the Bosses office at my job and told there was no work for us that month: We’d either need to take unpaid leave, or face redundancies. I left work that day facing three weeks of unpaid nothing. Some people would have looked for another job, or at least temp work to fill the time. Maybe some would have gone travelling or visited friends or at least tried to get some sunshine.
I set up a studio in the spare bedroom, and closed the door on the world.