This is the sixth of my ongoing series of blog posts on the Making Of my album as Granfalloon, Calendar - Chapter 2. To start at the very beginning and read my Making Of series for Volume 1, go here.
TRACK 6: HERE LIES 52
SUBJECT - A song that may, or may not exist
OPENING RAMBLE
As I’m sure you can imagine, this song-a-week deadline made 2014 an intense year. Writing a song a week in itself isn’t so intense but to have announced it publicly and to make each song release-worthy from Wednesday to Wednesday* for 52 weeks straight proved impossible. I managed to release something each deadline day but it remains debatable whether or not they were ‘release-worthy’. I like to write this opening ramble before I consult my 2014 notes as that generally changes how I view the song and it’s interesting to have both perspectives. If memory serves, ‘Here Lies 52’ was either the final song of the year or the penultimate song.
Either way I seem to remember it as an exercise in barrel-scraping. I was feeling not a little tapped out from the weekly deadline. It was definitely rewarding. That mid period bounce having honed me into writing ‘Barrel of Your Gun’ (from the forthcoming Calendar III), ‘A Year After The Party Died’, ‘Please Write Responsibly’, ‘Bee on a String’, ‘Barbican Blues’, and ‘RUExperienced?’ on the bounce (with only one weak week in the middle for a song called ‘Dumbest Gang in Town’). That’s not a bad run so I won’t be any harder on myself about what rediscovering the 2014 version of this song does. Anyway… loins sufficiently girded? Excuses sufficiently advanced? Homework sufficiently devoured by local canines? Let’s dive in…
WRITING IN 2014
Deadline: Wed 31st December 2014
I wrote this on my way to Australia. I was planning on writing it on Omnichord as I wasn't carrying a guitar but I awoke on deadline day to find Omnhichord [sic] George had run out of battery life. Disaster! Gadzooks! Zut alors! Shit!
I had to head out into London and find an instrument. Thank you to Stew and his pal Paolo for attempting to help me but I found a Cash Converters in Elephant & Castle who let me use one of their highest quality ukuleles and the privacy of their back office to write and record this song. Please forgive the Dylan nod in the middle eight. I'll probably fix that at some point.
The subject matter is based on my flight later that day.
I was flying at 10:30pm on New Year's Eve.
It takes 30 minutes (approximately) to fly across The Channel at which point the local time skips forward an hour instantly. As such if the flight took off even a minute late, I would miss midnight and of course exist outside time and space and become immortal.
The plane took off at 10:35pm.
Clearly the ravings of a madman. Let’s have a listen.
If I skip over midnight
The year it won’t end right
It’s not as bad as I was expecting. Probably best described as “a charming little ditty”. But once more, as with a lot of the material Lobelia and I tackled for Calendar - Chapter II, the concept deserved a more compelling execution. We’re talking time and space here.
MEANWHILE IN 2023
Schrödinger's Song eh? Now there’s a powerful idea.
I think this was either the first or the second song we tackled together in Lobelia’s home studio, that extremely productive morning in February 2023. It was important that this song had the space it needed, it couldn’t be heavily strummed, it couldn’t move too quickly. I remember Lo playing the G major to A major progression that I harmonised with and began singing.
It was in key that allowed me to explore the deeper end of my vocal range which immediately suggested Lo’s voice pairing it an octave above and occasionally branching off for the odd harmony (and those harmonies are beautifully odd).
You can hear from the demo from this session that I wasn’t using the deeper timbre in my vocal to begin with and it sounds like I was attempting a lot of adlibs which we stripped back. There’s some tasty stuff here which, in hindsight (hindsound?) could have added some extra moments of interest to the melody but those adlibs had to be sacrificed on a Spartan altar in order to give my and Lobelia’s dual vocals maximum room to complement each other.
The Chorus of ‘Here Lies 52 (2014-2024)’ is a finger picked progression that I took from an instrumental piece I wrote back in the Long Ago (could be 2007 but it’s impossible to know).
Impossible? No! Look at this! A trawl through my emails reveals some demos of the piece from 2009. Apparently I was thinking of using them for a soundtrack commission I was working on at the time:
This one is in a different time signature but I have a 2nd even less well recorded piece in 3/4. I find it endlessly fascinating how the decade spanning nature of this Calendar project continues to expand like a planet eating black hole, sucking in songwriting detritus from parts of my life far outside of its scope.
LYRICAL WAX
I wanted ‘Here Lies 52’ to be lyrically slight. My usual verbose approach needed to be tamed so that the song could feel as if it were to float away at any moment. I found myself removing words, going against my nature to squeeze that extra syllable in and prove to the class how clever I am.
To find the Chorus lyrics I engaged in a process of mumbling nonsense words and seeing what shapes the melody would form with no lyrical content in mind. I’ve since read that Jeff Tweedy of Wilco also engages heavily in this practice. Here’s an excerpt from his excellent Let’s Go There So We Can Come Back:
“One of the primary ways I write lyrics is to sing and record vocal sounds without words, vowel and consonants that sound like language but don’t actually mean anything. I’ll even double vocal tracks of these sounds without words—I call them “mumble tracks.” A lot of times people will hear them and think I’m singing real lyrics there, but I’m not. I mix them low so you have to struggle to hear, but loud enough so you can get the sound you want and get the melody to come through. With this approach, you can work on a song and finish it without even having the lyrics done.”
“Mumble track” is a delightful name and I was Mumbletracking heavily on this song.
I’ve made a note here to discuss ‘Prisencolinensinainciusol’, the Italian song released by Adriano Celentano in 1972, and so, I will, briefly. Celentano wrote the song as part of an exploration of the boundaries of lyrical communication. It’s sung using English/American vocal sounds but the words are nonsensical. As a demonstration of what English sounds like to non English speakers, it’s not bad. As a song, I love it. Anyway another example of it not being necessary to cram every word you know, or indeed any words you know, into a song. And parallel in its theme of being a song that may or may not exist. I may revisit this song as part of a larger case study when it comes to the feel of singing in various languages but for now, just enjoy this banger…
SIGN OFF
Thank you for accompanying me on this journey through time and space. Discussing songwriting in a quantum fashion is always tricky (as if he speaks from experience) but it provides an insight into how I approach songwriting in general these days. Songs can exist in limitless forms. Maybe an idea could be executed at a more sprightly tempo, in a different key, through reharmonised chords.
The traditional metaphor of a piece of music as a block of marble to be sculpted is a trite one but it holds true. That slab could become anything and I’ve found over the years that the chips and taps I want to make to each fresh one to be lighter and more delicate. I don’t want the image of the song to appear before it's ready. Potential is always so tantalising and wasting it is heartbreaking.
LISTEN TO HERE LIES 52 (2014-2024)
FURTHER LISTENING (Mumbletracks and Songs That May Or May Not Exist)
Impossible Germany by Wilco
Jesus, Etc. by Wilco
Cattails by Big Thief
Plastic Palace People by Scott Walker
If It’s Monday Morning by Lee Hazlewood
Prisencolinensinainciusol by Adriano Celentano
Opus 40 by Mercury Rev
One Sunday Morning (Song For Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend) by Wilco
FOOTNOTE CORNER
*The weekly Wednesday deadline for this project was completely arbitrary. I believe it was set because both Christmas day of 2013 and New Year’s Day of 2014 were Wedesdays and thus the precedent was set. It ended up being quite serendipitous though. If I had planned it at the time, I might have settled on a more ritualistic Monday or a Friday as the deadline but I’ve found over the years that the Weekend, with a higher proportion of my own gigs and social engagements, can prove quite an interruption to my creative flow. Having the deadline midweek actually allowed me to work on the song either side of the weekend. I honestly think this chance decision could be one of the major reasons why this project succeeded. Had I been aiming for Monday or Friday, I might not have written the amount of material I did and you might not be reading this now. So viva la Wednesday deadline.
Next post: coming soon
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