Here's a new song. I was thinking about raffles, village halls, coat pegs and varnished flooring when I was writing it. Video by Dan; filmed in Lewes at the weekend. Thanks Dan!
Email me if you want an mp3 copy, or leave any comments below. Ta.
Right, it's been absolutely ages since I last posted one of my songs up here - so here is a recent composition, 'Passing Song', which is set to a video that myself and Dan edited together last weekend. The song itself is not very clear, lyrically, but it's about hearing something hopeful in a sad sentence. Being told one thing, but hearing the promise of something else altogether.
A few years ago - as alert readers will remember - this blog was a (semi) focused thing, dedicated to blogging about, and publicising the scrappy, half-rehearsed antics of my band Assistant; which still sort of exists in our imagination and in hazy plans to get together and rehearse again, but which has a long-time since been publicly dormant: no gigs for quite a while, although never say never.
Back when we were young, we looked and sounded a bit like this.
The process of moving flat uncovers a multitude of sins, and in my case the paramount sin appears to be a lustful, insatiable desire to collect small objects; by which I mean anything smaller than a hardback book; incorporating buttons, seven-inch singles, paperclips, cables, bits of driftwood, hand-written notes, out of print penguin paperbacks with colourful covers, tiny musical instruments, travelcards, kinder egg toys, pebbles, bird-badges and bouncing balls.
Just about the only small item I'm always in need of, and never able to locate, is plectrums, and no matter how many I buy I swiftly lose them. I had anticipated that in cleaning out my old flat I would find lots of them under the bed or resting on skirting boards, but alas I didn't. The only plectrum I can always rely on finding is one that Pete gave me many years ago, transcribed with his name. Subsequently about 80% of the songs I've written in the last five years have been composed with his pick. Thanks mate.
Over the last month or two I've only picked up my guitar a few times, having been pretty tied up with my ukulele, which I'm slowly getting the hang of and enjoying using enormously. And as well as playing that a lot I've been scribbling lots of lyrics - mostly half thought-through - into my notepad for later use. One of those was a quick lyric for a song called 'Night Shifts At The Airport', which transcribed various memories and observations of mine, mostly dating back a few years, and jumbled them up with other hypothetical events I've never experienced, creating a weird half-poem which feels both made-up and oddly personal. Having written them down, I toyed with a few melodies and then gave up on the song.
Then a week or two ago I sat down by my computer and idly picked up my acoustic guitar, which feels all big and foreign after so much time with the uke. And I started playing a long, repetitive and very simple sequence of three chords - E, A and Am. And all of a sudden a song was in my head and I recorded the guitar, sang the completed lyric from my notepad and fed it quickly into Garageband, where the song sat for a few days feeling rather bare and lonely. Since then I've added a bass line, a bit of piano and some more guitars, but I think it still sounds simple and quick - or it's supposed to, at least.
Here it is:
Assistant - Night Shifts At The Airport (demo) [2.35 mins, 3.6mb]
Now that the sun is out more often, I've started serenading my friends with my ukulele whenever we go to the park. They smile thinly and glance at their watches, wondering when the weather will turn. But Dan is my most consistent and enthusiastic audience member, only occasionally heckling and rolling his eyes - and he recorded me playing a song ('Something Good That Grows') in Brighton's Montpellier Crescent Gardens a few weeks ago. Note me ad-libbing and confessing to Ant that I can't remember the words, and discover why I rarely choose to go clean-shaven these days...
More details on this song to follow; but here's a new one for you to try. This song was written over the last few weeks in a rare combination of locations: Lisbon, Somerset and the train from Bristol to Brighton last week. Once again, it's ukulele driven - I might as well just sell my guitar.
Assistant - Standards (demo) [2.13 mins, 3.5mb]
Okay, time for another song; I wrote and recorded this using my first - and at that point only - four ukulele chords in a hotel room in Leicester last week, a couple of hours after I bought the new instrument. The whole thing took me about an hour, so it's a bit rough and ready, but it sounds good to me. When I got back to Brighton I added a bassline and a (sort of) electric guitar solo, but everything else in the mix is uke, including the distorted guitar sounds.
Assistant - Something Good That Grows [2.13 mins, 3.1mb]
I'm massively taken with the Wave Pictures at the moment, as a forthcoming post will attest, and my obsession with their incredible 'Instant Coffee Baby' LP has reminded me that when I saw them play last year at the End of The Road I was much taken with the idea of picking up a ukulele. At that point the only purpose was to sit and play it by the tent and try to look cool (like them), but in the intervening months I've realised that having one would actually serve a more useful purpose, which can best be explained thus: I'm sick of looking around Leicester, Coventry and Hull.
Well, not really - it's always nice visiting new places, and I usually take the courtesy to look around, but the fact remains that I travel a lot for work these days, and spend a lot of time in hotel rooms. So having an easily transportable musical instrument to take with me is a real boon. Accordingly, I picked one up this week and took it to Leicester with me. Only had a couple of hours with it, but really enjoyed playing it - and wrote and recorded a song that evening. Will post it here later.
Photo below. In the meantime, only one observation: not actually making me look cool at all, then, unfortunately. Ah well.
Lots of song-writing activity recently at Assistant Blog towers; I've finally got with the modern age and started using Garageband for mixing down demos, and its incredible ease of use has inspired me to start writing new stuff - about six new songs in the last month, of which the following is the most recent. I wrote the lyrics sitting in the sun on Eastbourne pier on Saturday afternoon and improvised the song itself on my bedroom floor yesterday afternoon. Added some bits and bobs tonight but it's basically an afternoon's work - and I'm pleased with it, particularly the words.
Assistant - Relocate (home demo) [2.50 mins, 3.9mb]
"It's hard making bonds,
It's hard finding peace.
I moved from the country,
I moved to the sea.
I found myself a job,
in sales of property.
I moved to the sea,
but the city's calling me.
Relocate, relocate
'til you find yourself somewhere
you feel safe.
Relocate,
before it's too late.
And I love my new friends,
and my future is bright,
And my flat came cheap,
so that's alright.
But the doubt comes in waves,
that familiar fear -
I left my home behind
to come here.
Relocate, relocate,
you need feel no loyalty,
if you need
to escape
this anonymity".
I'm not writing so many songs at the moment, mainly because I've only got so much time and I've been focusing on other things. But a few weeks ago I was suddenly struck by the desire to sit down with my computer and guitar and plug in my 4-track without a song to play or any real intention of writing one. So what ensued was basically just five minutes of fuzz and echo and I'm neither proud of it nor embarrased. My fondness for the track, instead, derives from the pleasant memory of recording it, remembering that after ten or fifteen minutes of plugging in my guitar I was sat in the middle of the floor banging a glockenspiel with one hand and detuning a handheld radio with the other. Occasionally, if I remember rightly, I leant across to flick on the portable airpump which came with my camping mattress.
I tell you all this only so that you can adjust your expectations accordingly.
The song, if that is what it is, follows.
Assistant - Shapes (home demo) [4.51 mins, 4.4mb]
Right, time to make amends for that absolute stinker of a song I published yesterday - listened back to it in the cold light of a muggy Friday morning and thought, huh, that didn't work. What a mess. Sorry about that.
Will try to explain why it didn't work, if you're interested. Like I said, the first version of the song wasn't very loud at all, a kind of slow, dubby track created on my computer, with hardly any guitars at all. When I converted it over from my sequencer I realised that I could make it rockier, but only after I had laid down an initial acoustic guitar track. So when I did layer on the louder noises I did so over the other stuff and made the whole thing sound muddy as a consequence. It was a bit fast, too.
More problematically I wrote the whole thing in the wrong key, probably, and can't be bothered to transpose it. But to stay in tune I'm either singing too high or too low, which I can kind of get away with (in that I don't care too much about a few flaws), until everything is already a bit substandard, at which point, well, it falls apart a bit.
Ha ha, I'm a self-hating rocker.
Anyway, so it's back to the drawing board; have spent the evening trying a rather simpler approach, and have slowed it down a bit. There's less overdubbing but I've attempted not to sacrifice the overall noise quotient as a consequence. Hopefully it sounds a bit better!!
The making-it-up-to you version of 'Nice Day' is available at the following link:
Assistant - Nice Day (home demo II) [3.40 mins, 5mb]
Promise I won't do another recording of it tomorrow - sick of it now!!! You'll notice there's no careful fade-out this time - spent too long on it already!
I've been making crappy little home demos of songs for years and years and have learned one thing - if you want a song to work, the best thing to do is let it stand on its own and not drown it with noise, because as soon as you do it becomes something muddy and formless. One new song I've been working on recently has been through several iterations - the first demo was slow and mostly synthesised, so it was very clean and not really a rock song in any sense. The second was clean and crisp, a couple of guitars and no effects. For the third I failed to follow all my own rules and ended up layering guitars over it until, eventually, the vocals were all but submerged. So in a sense I didn't look after the song at all well, and ended up letting it off the leash while I looked in the other direction.
Anyway, I like it all a bit muddy, really, and there's something nice about the fact that a song ostensibly about being happy for someone else's good fortune ends up sounding aggressive and a bit furious. I might just have been indulging my liking for loud guitars, or a bit of good old straightforward bitterness might have crept through.
Anyway, I've talked it up much too much, it's just a quickie really. Here you go - lemme know what you think.
Assistant - Nice Day (home demo) [3 mins, 4.3mb]
UPDATE: Don't download this, I listened back and it's rubbish. If you follow this link here you can access a much better version. I'll leave the above recording up, though, just in case you want to compare and contrast. x
Here's a new song I've written in the last day or two - I wrote it after getting back from the pub last night and recorded the drums and guitars before I went to bed. Finished off by adding some vocals and a hint of feedback this evening, and mixed it up double quick. There's a few off notes but I'm really proud of it. It's only a small file so I'd appreciate it if anyone fancies downloading it and leaving any thoughts in the comments box.
Assistant - Admission (home demo) [2 mins, 2.7mb]
The Assistant Blog Digest is now listed as 'new and notable' on iTunes. For those of you who have had difficulty using that application, or can't utilise the XML feed, here's a straightforward copy of episode one as an MP3.
Assistant Blog Digest - Episode One.
More info on the podcast can be found here.
Assistant Blog Digest is a new monthly podcast from Assistant Blog. It rounds up a month's blogging by picking out the most interesting posts from this here site and collating them in a half-hour(ish) long audio format. Read by me, in my best plummy English tones, and containing a litany of half-starts and stutters, I hope you enjoy it. Subscribing via the iTunes music store will mean that new episodes turn up unasked in your iTunes folder towards the end of every month. iPod users will find the enhanced MP3 contains chapters to aid navigation - in other words, if you skip the politics posts here, or the more personal ones, you can do the same quickly and easily on Assistant Blog Digest. Lastly, the podcast is, of course, entirely free, and any and all feedback is keenly appreciated.
This link - provided by Apple - is not 100% reliable, but it should take you to the Assistant Blog Digest page on iTunes. If it doesn't, load up iTunes independently, go to the music store, and search for 'Assistant Blog'.
For non-iTunes users, a direct link to the MP3 will follow shortly. Those of you who access podcasts through bloglines, ipodder, google reader or another RSS/XML feed aggregator, you can find - and subscribe to - the XML file here.
The podcast on iTunes, for the curious, should look like this:
Let me know if you encounter any problems.
I'm going to re-publish some of my band's songs over the next few weeks, so that anyone who would like to listen in, can. I'll take a few paragraphs on each occasion to describe what I was thinking about - if anything - when I wrote the words. Apologies if you've heard all these songs before, or heard me prattle on about the meanings down the pub.
First up: 'August Song' (right click to download)
I wrote a bunch of break-up songs in the year surrounding my break-up with Vic, but they weren't all personal songs (or rather, not all about me and Vic) and around half were written before, as opposed to after, we called it a day. Whether I was in some way anticipating the split or not, I'm not sure, but it began when I listened to a couple of songs which really pierced me and got me interested in the idea of the break-up song, leading me to explore it in quite a few lyrics.
From that period 'What It Means', 'Sixteen Months', 'Easy to Leave', 'Criticism' and 'Known To Run' were all about breaking up or being broken up. The two songs that bowled me over were Sebadoh's 'Brand New Love', which includes the lyric "any thought could be the beginning / of the brand new tangled web you're spinning / anyone could be your brand new love", which I found tremendously uplifting, and the bittersweet observation, in Leonard Cohen's 'Famous Blue Raincoat', where the narrator accepts his former lover's new partner has been good for her: "Yes, and thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes / I thought it was there for good / so I never tried".
'August Song' was an attempt at an optimistic expression, too, being all about the moment when the past recedes and the pain becomes no more than an ache, or less. In this instance, I imagined meeting up with a past lover, keen to be reunited, but realising at that moment that more has changed than you think. So I sing:
"I know I asked you here
To tell you I still love you.
But the year's passed faster than I knew.
And suddenly I see that I exaggerated you."
I was trying to get at the politics of love a bit, too, which I perhaps managed a bit less well - that slightest of power struggles, where you try to assess the other person's feelings, seeing what strengths or weaknesses you face. Was trying to get at that with the chorus, "August shouldn't be this breezy / do you still need me?". I guess I was the person who broke up this hypothetical relationship, and was considering a re-tread.
It's quite a nice song, I think - musically I was getting really tired of loud guitars, so everything I wrote at that point had as little guitar as possible. We wanted this to sound dubby and spacious, and I think it does.
Leave your comments in the comments box if you have any feedback.
A night spent mostly cooking has meant I've not sat down to read a book or watch telly, or any of the usual things, tonight - but the one thing I have been doing is picking up my acoustic guitar and fiddling around with it; and the product, much to my surprise, is one of the quickest songs I've ever written - I'm sure it's not one of the best, but the words, melodies and chords all came together in about ten minutes, or around three plays through, so that's something of a record. Not wanting to lose it, I spent another twenty minutes making a very rough recording, so I've uploaded it for anyone to listen to if they want: it's short, quite soft, and a bit folky, and is about, er, relationships and stuff. Key lyrics follow; sorry if they're a bit bleak:
"Oh, I know you've got your dreams,
and I've taken them away.
I just bailed. I just bailed.
And they'll just fade away".
Assistant - Bailed (home demo) [2.8mb, right click to save]
Hope you like it.
A little more about categories:
Am making good progress with labelling stuff now - I think I'm more than half way through the nine hundred odd posts and some of the category pages are coming together - some are pretty much unpopulated still though. I noticed from my stats that someone, probably Nat, took a look at the environment category this morning, and found only one or two posts there. Should be more than twenty now, as I tried to address that section at lunchtime.
Most of my time has been spent on the posts detailing Assistant, and one thing which comes across very strongly is that fact that over the years we've hosted files for downloading in dozens of different, usually temporary, places - meaning that half of the photo links and pretty much all of the song links in the Assistant archive don't work at all. However, I fixed this last night by finally organising some webspace of my own on which to host files, so in a few days time, once I've uploaded them all and fixed the links in the archive, you should be able to explore the dozens of studio recordings, demos, rehearsal takes and live recordings which I've posted over the last five years. I'll let you know when they're all active, should you be interested, and might re-post some of the best bits.
Sidebar is still, incidentally, short of my list of favourite posts, more than a few links outside, and other bits and bobs. Will get there eventually.
Apologies if all this categorising and restructuring posting is of no interest to anyone but me - doing an overhaul of your possessions (whether they are photographs, journals, songs or plain memories) gives you an opportunity to dig through old thoughts and you invariably find things to talk about as a consequence - even if they are a little self-indulgent. Should be back to normal soon.
Gosh, the other thing I realise when I'm going back through old posts to categorise them: I really never blog about my band these days, do I? Must get back into the habit - although 2006 was a very quiet year for the band, for a number of good and bad reasons, we had our first rehearsal for a while quite recently, and I'm gonna make sure I get something else organised soon. In the meantime, I'm stocking up on songs and have been working hard on piecing together demos so that we can get going swiftly once we shake off our apathy phase.
So in the absence of new Assistant material - although I do have some stuff which I will post, actually - I thought I'd post a few demos and bits and bobs, should you be interested; obviously without the rest of the band's input they're often just half-songs, and quite often the lyrics are just placeholders, but taken as drafts they may be worth listening to. You can tell me if not.
Here's a very scrappy demo to get started with then:
Assistant - Foot Forward (demo) [2.75mb, right click to download]
It's deliberately quite loose, going for a loping, shuffling effect rather than something pristine and precise - of the stuff I demoed recently it's probably the least carefully put together; you can hear me get the melodica line wrong on two occasions, I think, and it has no ending and pretty unprepared vocals - I think I was improvising some of them, although the "foot forward / I forfeit" line was planned. Stylistically I guess you can hear a bit of Damon Albarn's Gorillaz type things there, but that's probably just because I'm singing in a flat voice and there aren't many guitars. Anyway - only a sketch really, but hope you like it - and that you hear a full band Assistant version before too long.
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