FAWM songs continued….
Scene – a lot of fun to play, a strong, muscular rhythm and a song sort of about my fear that my own self-judgment of my music in comparison to the sounds of the scene around me have kept from writing the things that really flow through my head.
My Awesome Fawm Song – a self-aware tune lamenting the difficulties of participating in FAWM. Watching as my room and environment generally went to Hell as I spent most of all my days writing and recording, making a mess, then clearing crap off my bed in order to sleep, waking up to it all again. I made a couple of references to the conversation groups online and shout outs to people who’d commented on my music. Lack of tagging in the FAWM community undercut my ability to truly shout out to them though. I absolutely Love the sound of my vocal on this recording.
Negative Space – Called in Sharif for this one. A moody song plumbing some of the tragedy from when I was teaching and combining a couple of different ideas to talk about the idea that all too often we CAN’T solve problems, but we do our best to make the world better one piece at a time. People accused the tune of being pretty, and I was definitely stretching my voice. I can’t actually imagine performing this Live. Also, what with HARM and Spring this would give me a nice little triumvirate of tunes in drop B.
Natural 20 – Another geeky Love song – this one with a lot of gamer references that are perhaps a little oblique for the community at large. A natural 20 is a critical strike or success in the majority of gaming systems that I’ve played. I’m hoping to do a little bit of re-writing to make the “That’s Not How the Force Works” be something friends and fans will want to holler along with.
Can’t Sleep / Won’t Sleep – Definitely hit a wall at one point during this whole exercise, and sometimes you just need to commit something to paper (or to tape… er… disk) and this was the result. I really was just experimenting with different sounds and different counts slightly inspired by that week’s FAWM challenge (there are weekly challenges that you can participate in that sort of highlight your songs) of “polyrhythms”. I basically wrote the song so that the “I CANT SLEEP I CANT SLEEP” rounded on the 3 count, while the bum bum bum bum bass line rounded on the 2 and the Wavedrum percussion turned around on the 7. Put that all together and you’ve got something that only comes together every 42 beats, which of course has great nerd significance.
Sorry If – Haven’t decided if this is a keeper, if it will be expanded into something else or not. Above all else, I’m finding it almost impossible to sing and play this rhythm at the same time, which is NOT a reason to give up on it, but which is often a reason I put things down for a bit. VERY fun to just make a whole lot of distorted noise.
Common – This is mostly an old song that just never gelled. I re-worked the lyrics and the chords and put it back together, dusted off my fretless bass and recorded it and am pretty happy with the result. It’s a song about being a performer and how that can affect your relationships.
