Bringing Back the Mists of Time

After a year of work, The album, Winter, is finished.

The album has been something of a labor of love even though it took me 35 years to get it done. That, of course, is misleading: it took me 34 years to start.

Which isn't technically accurate either.

After PearceArrow, and Broken Hearts and the Fabulous Perch, I wrote two albums worth of music, which became Desperate Mothers, and Winter. Having worked with Brian Waters, who was a good friend, and who had produced PearceArrow, and Broken Hearts, I thought we would get together to record these songs, but it never happened.
Brian has his own projects and was trying to find work as a full time recording engineer; I was getting into my own DIY production and was more demanding of what I wanted, and the people I had played with before had other projects and bands as well, or had moved to more music-centric locations like LA, Austin, or Nashville. Denver wasn't thought of as a hopping hotbed of music, though there were many talented performers at that time, such as Jill Sobule and Bruce Odland.

When I wrote the songs, I had just started using my Tascam 244 4-track cassette recorder and Winter was the first time I put together a true demo, with drums and bass to go along with the guitars and vocals. But I didn't have decent outboard gear and used a Fender amp to record with as it had reverb. And it sounds exactly as you might imagine: good enough to play for others, but certainly not for release.
As I got better mics and gear, I went back and recorded the songs of Desperate Mothers and continued on with new music, such as Ice Flows, Life Without Chickens, and Apologia.
Winter got left behind, and remained, in some ways forgotten.

Part of the problem was that in the mid-80's, I didn't have the studio to record them as I heard them in my head. The Winter songs were more Jazz based and I wanted them to be more lush; more like Steely Dan records, which had inspired the songs at the time they were written. And as time passed, I focused on more of a lean sound for the new songs I was writing.

Winter, was just an old cassette of songs at the bottom of the box of old cassette demos I would every blue moon take out and play.

So what happened?

Last year, after I finished Whispers (From a Forgotten Memory), I thought it might be time to go back to the Winter songs. I had 24 tracks to work with and real drums and keyboards, and most importantly, I could do all the harmony and backing vocals I couldn't do with  the 4-track. It took a while with all the other projects and new music I was working on, but I kept at it and now have a recorded version of Winter that I think is very good and that I want to release.

That will be in June 2019.

In the meantime, I'll be featuring the songs each week at mrprimitivemusic.com.

©2019 David William Pearce

How do I play that again?

There's an assumption that you can remember everything you've ever done and can recall it on cue.

Sadly, I've found, this isn't true.

Case in point, there are songs I've written and recorded that I don't remember how to play. That doesn't mean I can't go back and figure out what I was doing, because I've had to do just that, but it's kind of depressing nonetheless.

I should be able to effortlessly pick up a guitar and just start playing whatever tune I want.

This sad state of affairs has coma about as I've begun to perform more and have this impish desire to play more of my back catalogue. There are certain restraints however. The most notable is most of the songs were not written or recording to be performed troubadour style, or perhaps more accurately, singer-songwriters style with just me and a guitar, although in truth, the delightful Nancy K often accompanies me.

As a result, I've hit upon the idea of recording backing tracks to play and sing along with. Think Karaoke except using my own songs. It also gives me an opportunity to show off my unique, to my mind, lead guitar techniques. For the most part, this has gone well, and with the new songs I've written over the last 4 or 5 years, I simply create a backing track after I record the song in its totality.

It's the older stuff that, on occasion, gives me fits.

Why?

Well... if I'm honest, and really, who wants that, that fact is I did a really poor job in writing down important things like chord progressions, track lists; actually, other than the lyrics, I didn't write anything down, and once the song was complete, I simply moved on to the next song. I blame Steely Dan-certainly in their 70's iteration when they gave up touring for the studio.

Consequently, I'm forced to play along and try to figure out what the hell I was doing all those years ago. It's embarrassing. I should know this stuff!

Sadly, as I've said, I don't.

So let this be a lesson to all your wippersnappers out there: document what you're doing or suffer my fate.

Which reminds me, I should write some of the new stuff down...

©2019 David William Pearce

Photo by Stas Knop from Pexels

How to be a Great Lyricist in 3 Easy Steps

Over the course of many years, I have written and recorded more than a hundred songs and until I came across an article in Writers Digest on how to write lyrics, I can't say that I ever actually gave the process any thought.

So I thought about it.

My basic process is I come up with some music and it, at some point depending on whether there's any deadline, which there generally isn't, inspires a theme, which I write the lyrics to. The lyrical structure, how many verses, choruses, and bridges, in dependant on the musical structure. I have a thing with threes, and there's usually a chorus, and maybe a bridge depending on whether the song is more jazz oriented than pop or rock.

I then break the theme into a few sections, come up with something I think is appropriately inspiring or moving or pithy and call it good. Which is more or less what the article advances.

My questions arise when I think about whether it's good or bad to to block out-by block I mean as in building blocks-lyrics? The blocks are just stand-ins for what and where they are in the song, be it verse, chorus, etc. The author maintains this allows structure for creating witty or deep or whatever type of lyric you're writing. I tend to think it leads to a sameness across your lyrics and songs, especially if the lyrics come first, the songs must be structured to fit the lyrics, and if they don't, but you depend on lyrical structure, then your songs will all structurally be the same.

Which is apparently saying the same thing.

Ironically, if you're writing, or trying to write, modern pop songs, the lyrics, more and more, are being reduced to mere hooks repeated ad nauseum throughout the song, so other than to keep people from hopping from song to song, the lyrics aren't that important.

Therefore this really only applies if you're writing to be listened to on a deeper level.

Having done my own thing all these years, I'll continue to stick with it, but, like with the musical composition itself, it's nice to know there are templates out there to get you organized.

©2019 David William Pearce