This is the fourth of my ongoing series of blog posts on the Making Of my new album as Granfalloon, Calendar - Chapter 2. To start at the very beginning and read my Making Of series for Volume 1, go here.
TRACK 4: TWO FEET
SUBJECT: Luck
OPENING RAMBLE
After the deeply intimate personal writing of the previous blog for ‘Travelling Song’, I’m sure we’ve all had just about enough of confessional singer-songwritery angst eh? Well this has worked out rather nicely then as the next track on the album* is about the rather abstract and indeed deeply fickle subject of ‘luck’. I think this subject matter was also chosen by Jess Roberts who was my partner-in-crime for the 2014 song heist that was The 52 Project.**
I’ve noticed that Jess often chose more generalised and universal themes (Travelling, Luck, Heartbreak) while I mostly plumped for more specific subject matter (Someone who sells something, Being turned into a tree, etc.). I don’t say this with any judgement in mind, I feel there’s beauty, interest and emotional power in both the universal and the specific, but the differences between the way the two are harnessed is fascinating to me. Jess’s background is in Country music which definitely mines those universal themes heavily but it also makes a lot of use of that specificity. In fact, there is a podcast on that very subject that I would recommend, covering the songwriter Bobby Braddock and a song he co-wrote called ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today’.
WRITING IN 2014
The note at the top of the page says the deadline for this song was 5th February 2014. Here are the notes I made about it at the time.
This was the first song I tackled after announcing the '52' project. Naturally the moment I invited the outside world in to see what I was up to, my writing seized up and I hit a momentous bout of Writer's Block. Normally I would just wait until this sort of thing subsided but there's no such luxury with this song-a-week challenge. I had to just plough through which led [to] a lot of terrible drafts of songs based around various ideas surrounding 'luck'.
Aside from the pressure of people actually knowing if I'd failed was that this wasn't my topic [choice] and I feel I've already exhausted the topics of predetermination, lack of belief in fate and making your own choices - at least for now.
I eventually managed to crack the song via a chance conversation about where the phrase to "slip someone a Mickey" came from.
The popular theory is that it was named for a Chicago landlord named Michael ‘Mickey’ Finn who was eventually charged and convicted of drugging his customers with Chloral Hydrate before robbing them and unceremoniously throwing them in a nearby dumpster where they would awake assuming they'd had too much to drink.
Thus I started to work on a story of one such customer trying to piece together where such a promising evening went wrong and how he could right those who wronged him and turn his luck around.
In the end I was pleased with the result and the more I listen to the song, the more it grows on me.
Would sound better with some saxophone on though I think.
It’s very telling, that sentence that I’ve written there: “I feel I’ve already exhausted the topics of predetermination, lack of belief in fate, etc.”
In fact, 9 times out of ten, if I’m hitting a creative block it’s either because the subject doesn’t speak to me or because I feel I’ve wrung everything I can out of it. So how do I get myself interested in the subject? How to explore the writing possibilities left hiding under those mouldy looking jars at the back of the cupboard? The answer is: Specificity!
Have a listen to the 2014 version here:
The story about Michael/Mickey Finn and his customers seems compelling enough. And there’s a writing affectation I’ve used here that even 10 years on feels appealing. I’ve begun each Verse with an inanimate object and asked it to recount what it saw on the night/morning in question:
Ashtray
Tell me a story…
Alleyway
Tell me a story…
Casket
Tell me a story…
That affectation feels worth returning to. Keep your peepers peeled for a future Granfalloon song featuring the internal monologues of entire Greek choruses of toaster ovens, light fittings and kitchen rolls! A concept album about the decision making process of a humble, working class coffee machine who has to choose between her locally-sourced family or some fancy new beans, and in a moment of heightened stress ends up scalding the pistachio milk and learning a valuable home truth about staying true to one’s school***.
Anyway that was then…
MEANWHILE IN 2023
In the room with Lobelia, my co-writer for this album, I’ve foregone the third person storytelling and the inanimate object Point Of View. The song we started writing was truly a different song, borrowing only that subject matter of ‘luck’.
At her place in Birmingham, Lobelia and I discussed ‘luck’. I tried to keep the original 2014 version away from Lo to begin with, as I wanted to see where the creative process would take us without her instincts working with that information. It’s a process I use a lot, as an artist who’s had to abandon/rewrite/rerecord/rerelease so many projects over the years due to unreliable collaborators. I have that historical safety net there but I would rather see what fresh territory we can stake without that baggage.
The discussion veered to the concept of ‘not realising or appreciating your own luck’, certainly something I’ve experienced, certainly something Lo has experienced. In fact, I think everyone has experienced this at some point in their lives… Hey! We’re back at the Universal again!****
I think the chord movement of the Verse was originally Lo’s idea though I can’t recall with certainty. Certainly the 3/4 time signature suggests that, as Lo doesn’t have the same complicated relationship with the Waltz that I do (scroll to the Production/Rewriting section to read all about that).
After a brief discussion with Lo she confirms:
“The Riff and the melody, along with the Chorus, was from a song I had partially written. [It was…] the best use of an unfinished song”.
Lobelia, like myself, was in the recycling game and it is worth reiterating the Hemmingway quote which hangs over this blog like a mantra: “The only kind of writing is rewriting.”
It would be great to get hold of Lobelia’s original version but in lieu of that, I have some audio from our writing session here:
You can hear we have the majority of the structure in place by this point and, as Lo said, the Verse and Choruses were already done but it still felt like the song wanted to go somewhere away from the simple ABABAB format.
After much trial and error we settled on taking the song to an instrumental followed by a vocal harmony section. To my ears, these form a two part Outro section.
To arrive at the final destination for that structure, Lo and I engaged in some ‘jamming’. I’m not a big jammer. I have a strong and instinctive internal melodic and harmonic radar but my motor functions and skills as a musician often let me down when I want to take the physical music to where I’m hearing it in my mind. As such, I like to slow the process down and work things out to make sure we don’t breeze right over the peculiar or weirdly shaped idea I have in my brain and end up settling on something more prosaic. I’ve seen too many musicians over the years jamming themselves into a very square corner. Smoothing off the edges. Even-ing those odd number bars and polishing out anything dissonant or not in key.
This is one of the many reasons I love working with Lobelia. We’ve managed to find a version of jamming where we can instinctively lead and be led by each other. It can settle into a holding pattern to allow us to move what we’re playing melodically or rhythmically until THAT moment, the hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck moment which tells us where the song wants to go.
The latter half of ‘Two Feet’ is a perfect example of this methodology and it allowed me to introduce a very Love-esque chord progression for Lobelia to solo over.
WARNING! HIC SUNT MUSICA THEORIA
Ostensibly the song is in the key of D major and the instrumental section moves to B minor. So far, so relative minor (normal)*****. And from the B minor it moves down to an A major before adding that juicy F# bass note. Again still in relatively normal territory but then we flatten that F# into a F, making it a Major 7th (man o man, I love me some Major 7th) before modulating to B major and from there modulating again back to B minor to repeat the chord sequence. And on the second time around, instead of that odd minor-major-minor modulation, this time we hold on the Fmaj7 in a ‘skipping record’ style. This also feels reminiscent of the musical style of Love to me.
That’s the second time I’ve mentioned them so I’ll just briefly explain that I’m referencing a band (rather than the concept!). Love were a band from 1960’s California fronted by Arthur Lee. They’re a significant (read humongous) influence on me and my music and anyone wishing to explore them should start with the incredible album Forever Changes.
Now none of this ‘Two Feet’ chord-y tomfoolery was planned or written with any theory in mind. This is all post-hoc analysis. We just went where it felt like the song wanted to go. Indeed from the skipping Fmaj7 the song then leaps to an A with a G# bass, alternating between that and an F# for the (almost) a cappella harmony section. This was another moment where I had a clear direction in my mind for where I wanted this section to go, it was just a matter of forcing the physical music into that shape. You can hear from the demo version above that Lobelia and I experimented with some very different ideas for that section which weren’t the one I had in my head. It sounds like I’m vocalising wildly on this demo in an effort to find where I want it to go!
Here’s another version where I’m being a little spicy on the last go around the vocal refrain.
I’ve touched a little here on what feels like my belief in musical pre-determinism but that feels like a mega subject to explore right now and this blog entry is already a pretty hefty read so I’ll stick that in the back pocket to explore in a future post.
LYRICAL WAX
One and one and one make three
Approach the problem scientifically
Solve for X and tell me Y do I complicate this serendipity?
I think the original ‘numbers’ conceit came from the idea of a love triangle. My memory of this isn’t clear but based on my brief conversation with Lo, it’s entirely possible she had that first line. It makes sense and that mention of ‘science’ would have led me to the third line. The numbers and science wordplay definitely feels like it has my grubby pun-loving fingerprints all over them.
I ended up having a lot of lyrical fun with this, inflating the number of people involved in the love triangle to an absurd amount… (Four! Plus six! Plus twelve! Makes twenty-two! Why, you’re describing a ‘love icosikaidigon’!) it certainly sounds like a hell of a night for everyone involved.
LISTEN TO TWO FEET FROM CALENDAR II
SIGN OFF
Another month, another blog on How We Wrote The Songs. These posts are becoming longer every time but also gaining more structure. It feels like they’re gathering enough room to deep dive into the real nuts and bolts of songwriting and I’m 100% in favour of the Long Form Content Revolution™. Vive La Long Form Content Revolution™! I hope you’re finding something interesting in these missives. If you’d like me to write more about specific aspects of the songs, let me know.
FURTHER LISTENING
ON YOUTUBE
THAT DEVIL SPOTIFY
And here’s the podcast on the beauty of specificity in Country music once again:
Next post: coming soon
FOOTNOTE CORNER
*Hmmm… maybe there was something in my choice to place these two songs next to each other in the tracklisting? I wonder if I make these subconscious tracklisting choices often… I’ll look into it and get back to you.
**At least at the start of the year. I think she dropped out around week 10 or 11.
***Is it too obvious I’m in a cafe right now?
****This has become such a recurring theme throughout this blog now, I’m going to start capitalising ‘Universal’ and ‘Specific’ to denote them as writing processes.
*****For you amateur songwriters, B is the 6th note in the key of D major. The 6th note almost always makes a Minor chord and often provides a good starting point for a new section of a song. Very basic songwriting theory lesson over.
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