Happiness. Lily and I are finally slipping into summertime. She whiles away the time squawking and mewling at birds on the powerlines outside the window and I knock out songs. I don't think she minds my singing to myself around the apartment, although she gets a little nervous when the tape recorder makes whirring, squeaking noises. She's abandoned striding across the keys while I'm practicing, now she just lays on the upper end of the keyboard and blinks at me. But what is this, a blog about my cat? No, friends, this is about the WORK.

Up On The Orange Moon is almost finished. It took a while, but that's how it works sometimes. Some songs take a day, others take a month. I've been very productive thanks to this blog. I'll hopefully have the lyrics finished by the weekend at which time I'll put them up. Thanks very much to the person whose post name is "moxiegrl" for pointing me toward the short story The Yellow Wallpaper. I'm indebted to her. The song ended up being about a creative, dynamic woman who is deemed insane by her overbearing husband. He sends her away to an institution to cure her. Unfortunately, like in the story, being locked up makes her actually go insane. I like that the story has a feminist slant. I suppose I'm into feminist themes (see the manequin in Long Island City Love Song, or the singing vagina in One Of Those Nights from the first IHML). Anyway, in the beginning of UotOM, the imagery of the lyric is really flowery and romantic, but by the end it gradually becomes more disturbing. So does the music.

It's difficult to describe the music portion of the song in words without getting too technical, but in the introduction of the song there's a lilting, but sad, piano melody that's played fast and soft, accompanied by little harp-like figures. It's all very tender and sweet, going back and forth between Eb and G. Halfway through, a variation of the main vocal melody appears over the same accompaniment pattern. This moves into a little interlude, and by the time the verse begins, the texture has become really romantic, with thick chords, big octaves in both hands and moving inner voices. My model for the music was Schumann's Kreisleriana (I'm not sure if that's the right spelling). I haven't filled in the middle of the song yet; that is, the chorus, where the main melody happens. It's rare that I write a song from front to back. Usually I work on sections at a time and then work on joining them together with transitional sections. In this case, since I knew I wanted the song to begin and end in a similar way, I wrote the ends of the song first, and worked toward the middle. At the end, the introduction music comes back, only it's creepier, less consonant. It still has the same melody, but the harmony is based on seconds. I'm getting a bit technical here, so I'll stop there.

In between working on this song, I've been recording demos of pop songs for our band Parks & Recreation to give to the others while we're on hiatus, so they can start thinking about ideas. Yesterday and the day before I recorded rough versions of two new songs. I played all the instruments, recording and mixing them in Garage Band. I was inspired to do this by my friend Jason, who has been working on some of his own songs on his computer in our rehearsal space. He played a song he'd done for me that sounded really good and I got a bug, I guess. What struck me most about Jason's song was his excellent and tender harmony vocals. I've never been very good at vocal harmonies. But I tried my hand at them in my demos, and am quite pleased with the results. Luckily, I've been also playing with Dave Depper in Blanket Music, who is excellent at backing vocals.

I hope to get this song done at least by the weekend so I can spend my time reading You-Know-What like the rest of the WORLD, apparently.

As always, more later.

I've been waking up late every day this past week. I really have to break this pattern. I get up at noon or 1 with only an hour or so to work on music before I have to get on my bike and head to work. Lily is angry with me. She's feeling a bit neglected, what with me getting home late and waking up late. When I sit at the piano, she lays across the keys, or attacks my fingers and arms. I constantly have to remove her mewing, thrashing body from the keys in order to get anything done. Sometimes I pause to dangle a toy at her to play with. This appeases her only for a short time, however, and she's back to striding across the keys or attacking me. Today we had a rough time. She threw a tantrum and kept leaping from the floor straight onto my arm, sinking her teeth in with every jump. In the end, I had to put her in the bathroom until I was finished. She'll be okay when I get home, hopefully. I'll bring her some treats and play with her. Anyway, despite these distractions, things are really cooking.

The lyric for the verse to Up On The Orange Moon is almost finished. Also, the introduction officially weighs in at 16 bars. At first I was just going to make it a quick 4 bar introduction, but I liked the melody I came up with, so I expanded it. I came up with the expanded version while I was riding my bike across the Burnside bridge yesterday. It contains material from the rest of the song. Bits of the vocal melody from the song are woven into the A section, and the harmony for the bridge of the song is included in the B section. It functions not just as an introduction, but as a kind of overture to the song. The trouble I'm having is what to do with the texture in the B section. Should it be different: Block chords, or just the same texture over the new harmony? I'll play with it more tonight when I get home. I wish there was a way I could describe this introduction in words, without being too technical. But it's impossible, so I'll just leave it there.

The best ideas seem to come when I'm doing something unrelated to music. This is most often true when I'm in transit. On my bike, with nothing else to think about and no one to hear me singing to myself, I usually come up with something. This blog is really helping, because it seems like every time my brain has a few moments to think about nothing, it settles on this music. On road trips I always take a handheld tape recorder with me so I can sing ideas into it while I'm driving. My cell phone even has a handy little voice recorder for memos, so I use that too. This is handy for bus stops and street crossings (while on foot, of course!).

I'm sad because we start filming again this weekend and I have to work Saturday and Sunday, so I won't have much time to do more work. I'm hoping Monday and Tuesday next week will be productive days. Anyway, more later.

I'm playing with fonts now. I kind of like this one.

I got home today after my meeting with Darrell Grant and filled out the introduction to Up On The Orange Moon. It went slowly, but I already had the melody from this morning, so that sped things up a bit. It was just a matter of figuring out the texture I was hearing .For that I leafed through the Schumann music I had been listening to to find the texture I wanted. I found something similar to what I was hearing, and started playing with it. In the end I got what I wanted. Now I have the first 4 bars of piano written. Yay! It took two hours (4 bars in two hours?!) Plus I had to take it to work with me because I had trouble with one chord. That's the part I always dread about writing piano music. I can get hung up for an hour on 1 measure, trying to find on the keyboard that thing that I'm hearing or else trying to carve out all the possiblities and then settle on one. If I had perfect pitch, like my friend Dave Depper, or even Darrell Grant, I could just know what I'm hearing and jot it down. Oh well. At least I'm hearing something. And, I am getting faster. So, onward!

The wheels are finally in motion. Last night I went to sleep listening to Schumann's Scenes From Childhood and I woke up at 4AM with an intro for Up On The Orange Moon in my head. I climbed out of bed and sketched out just the melody. I just scribbled out the notes in the main melody and made a sketch of what the rest of the texture would be. While I was lying down in bed I took a good mental picture of what I was imagining, so I wouldn't forget what the general texture would end up like. So that's progress, then, isn't it.

I also had a meeting with Darrell Grant of Portland State this morning, during which he told me some specific things I need to work on over the summer. I felt really good when I left his office. Now I don't have to work on Bach (not that I mind working on Bach) and can concentrate on solo piano arrangements of my favorite songs. I'm going to work on My Romance and But Not For Me. The former is already finished, but I want to improve it, and I need to practice it. The latter is in its infancy, with the first 8 measures done, plus an intro. That's going to be the bulk of my work for school. So If I can spend the summer doing solo arrangements of other people's songs, then doing solo arrangements of my own songs will be that much easier. Every creative thing I do feeds every other creative thing I do.

Not only that, but the immortal Bob Ham gave me a copy of one of those little 33 1/3 books for my birthday (thanks Bob!): the one about the Beatles' Let It Be. I was wondering if anyone out there was going to do one of those about the Beatles. Reading about their creative process got me all inspired as well.

It's amazing what that, coupled with talking to oneself online can do to bolster one's creativity. But enough writing about it, get to work, son!

I have already written 3 songs for the IHML 2, but they're unfinished. All I have are the titles of the songs, the vocal melodies, and the chord changes. The next step for all three songs is to fill in the piano texture and finish the lyrics. One of the problems I'm having is with the lyrics. Two things are blocking my ability to finish them. The first is the fact that writing nostalgic lyrics is really trendy right now and I'm extremely self-conscious about being perceived as following that trend. The second is that I want the lyrics to be well written and not depend on the nostalgia for their merit. I'll explain:

Regarding the first point, for the past few years I've noticed a certain trend in pop music, at least in indie-pop music, toward a kind of Victorian nostalgia. The 19th century especially is really "in" right now. Kids our age are singing about naval ships, carnivals, World Wars, and milking old fashioned themes. Bands are even posing in period costumes. I've seen countless ads in the weeklies where bands who don't even sing about nostalgic themes are posing in old costumes. I saw an ad for a coffee shop here in town in which the whole staff was done up like Civil War soldiers. Personally, I think it's pretty cool. But I, being the terminally self-conscious (sp?) person that I am, find myself resisting this trend, as I tend to resist all trends, rather than going with it. The trouble with resisting is, if I'm going to put these parlor songs in a historical context, I'm going to have to write lyrics that are old-fashioned. Or am I? I could do something very Franklin Bruno and write lyrics that are more contemporary on top of the old-fashioned sounding music. I suppose the solution to this aspect of the problem is to just get over it. It doesn't have to be a trend, it could just be the collective artistic consciousness affecting me in the same way it has affected my contemporaries.

Regarding the second point, one of the byproducts of this trend is that in some cases good writing takes a back seat to mere nostalgic imagery. In other words, people mistake lists of 19th century artifacts (muskets, trenches, soldiers, gypsies, trapeeze artists, silks and spices) for good lyric writing. Strings of nouns become the artifice, rather than the art being in the way the words are put together. The mere mention of a circus, a duel, or a sailing ship elevates the lyrics in the mind of our impressionable listeners and seems to make things easy on the songwriter. They let the setting become the character; even dwarf the character. So you're left with empty, cookie-cutter Dickensian fluff. Even I have a vague mention of the technology of the times in my song Oh, James from the INHALE Vol. 1. In that song, the character tells his butler to turn off the gramophone. (Of course, the joke is on me, because in the liner notes from that album the date of composition of the song is way before gramophone were in people's homes). But the difference there is that the character mentions the gramophone because he's in the room with it, it's playing, and he wants it turned off. In other words, the setting comes through the character's desires and actions.

The way to get around the pitfalls of this trend, then, is to make the lyrics strongly character driven. That means I'll have to go deep into the character who's singing the song and mine the situation itself for my material. If I focus on the narrator, then his or her historical context, if it's even important, will come through his or her narrative. For example, one of the songs is called Up On The Orange Moon. I'm pretty sure I want that song to be about a woman who's about to be shipped off to an asylum. She's crazy, this woman, and her lover is tired of it and is shipping her off. I picture her running into a vast room, the library of her manor maybe, whose walls are comprised of towering bookshelves. The room is all done up in dark woods and leather furniture. There is a great big curved window on one wall flanked by gigantic velvet curtains, in front of which sits an armchair. This woman's lover, Misha, is in the armchair staring up at the moon. She runs to him, having just slipped past the guards and starts singing. What does she sing? I have only part of it. The lyric I have so far is:

Where silver frosted mountains rise to the velvet sky
and powdered sugar fountains sparkle in Gemini
there my slice of paradise
hovers above your room
and ... up on the orange moon

The ellipses is where the lyric isn't finished. Something happens up there on the orange moon. But I haven't figured out what. And this lyric has been in my head for months. Almost a year actually. Anyway, nothing I just mentioned, the library, the asylum, the books (especially the books) should end up in the lyric. That should only be the setting for me to place this character. If she happens to pick up a book, or talk about the furniture, or the van coming to get her, with the clop clop of horses hooves or something, fine, it'll go in. But other than that, the song should be this woman's narrative at this particular time. I'll have to think about what she wants, why she's there, what she's saying. What's the purpose of the song for her? Maybe she doesn't want to go away. Maybe she's defying him in some way, saying, "okay, you can send me to a crazy house, but I'll always love you." Or, better, "you can send me to a crazy house, but it won't make me sane. I'll always have my paradise up there on the orange moon." Yeah, maybe they're trying to straighten her out or something, but she doesn't want to be sane. Something like that.

Now we're getting somewhere. More later.

The other day I wrote a song for our band Parks & Recreation. I thought it might be valuable to reflect on how I did it. It's important sometimes to reflect on process. There are many ways a song can get written, and it's worth it to examine all the possibilities, so I don't get stuck trying to squeeze a song out of one process all the time. It's bad to get set in one's ways. So here goes:

Lily and I were cleaning the apartment (I was sweeping, she was chasing dusballs away and attacking the broom) and listening to the Zombies album Time of the Season. Toward the end of the album, they have a song where the singer reflects on how nice it is to have friends who are in love. I started to imagine that subject from a different point of view. What about a song in which the protagonist, a bachelor, sings about how annoying his couple friends are and how he's so very glad to be single? He could sing about the annoying things his couple friends do; but in the bridge, we find out that he's really jealous of their happiness and actually quite lonely. So with that in mind, I turned off the record and started singing aloud to myself (and to Lily, who was mrowring at some birds outside the window), trying to come up with a melody. In the chorus of the Zombies song, the background vocalists sing the names of various couples over the main vocalist's melody. So I started improvising on names of couples. After a few minutes I made up a verse section, a chorus, and a bridge section. At this point I stopped cleaning and got out my trusty handheld tape recorder.

Let me stop here for a moment and point out that I consider there to be two essential songwriting tools, especially for writing pop songs. They are: 1) a tape recorder and 2) a rhyming dictionary. Notice I didn't mention an instrument. It's important for me to be away from an instrument when I'm working on a song. At least at first. That way I can imagine the song in my head, where the possibilities are endless and I'm not limited to what I can do on the instrument. The ideas seem to flow much more freely, and I can imagine the song as a whole, rather than getting caught up in tiny details and interrupting the flow. The instrument is usually my last step. Even when I do employ it it's only for reference. I'll explain what I mean later. So, moving on:

Having made up the melody and some lyrics, I then sang them into the tape recorder. This was useful in case I needed to stop working and go off to work or something I'd have a record of what I'd done. Anyway, it took a couple of tries to get the melody right. Usually I'll just mumble some nonsense lyrics to hang the notes on, but in this case, the lyrics pretty much came out on the first try. So at this point I got out the rhyming dictionary to polish them up a bit. By "polish", I mean I had to clean up some of the words, make the rhyme scheme line up, choose different words that might get the meaning across better. Let me show you what I mean. The first lyric I came up with was:

"Molly and Rick are always bickering
there's no end to the battles of jenny and ken
katie has klaus chained to the house
and dinner at jack's always ends with peggy never coming back"

You won't find the rhymes at the ends of the lines. The rhyme scheme is based on patterns of assonance (sp?), or the repetition of vowel sounds. I was satisfied with the first line, because the vowel sounds go in a nice pattern. Molly rhymes with always, and rick goes with bick-. (I don't count the vowel sounds in "and" and "are" because they are unstressed). Looking at just the vowel sounds, then, we have the pattern O I O I. I like that. In the second line, the vowel pattern is E A E E.( "there's no end to the battles of jenny and ken"). This seemed off balance, so I changed the name "Jenny" to "Natalie" to go with "battles". Now we have E A A E. That's nicer. I changed the name "Katie" in the third line to "Lanie" because I actually have a friend named Kate who's one half of a couple, and I didn't want her to think the line referred to her. But even after changing the name, the vowel pattern is A OU A OU. That works great. Now the fourth line is a bit tricky, because there are an odd number of stressed vowels: "dinner jacks ends peggy back", or I A E E A. There's no pattern here whatsoever. So I changed "Peggy" to "Linda" so it would match with "dinner." Now, at least it's I A E I A. That's a little tighter, I think. The assonance between "dinner" and "Jack" is repeated at the end with "Linda" and "back". I couldn't switch the words around to make the pattern I A E A I, which would be ideal, because the constraints of English grammar prevented me from being able to get it perfect. Finally, I changed the phrase "battles of Natalie and Ken" to "the Battle of Natalie and Ken" so that instead of little tiny battles, it would be like one big never ending historic battle. Like the Battle of Bunker Hill or something. I thought it was more dramatic. So with revisions, the finished lyric is:

"molly and rick are always bickering
there's no end to the Battle of Natalie and Ken
lanie has klaus chained to the house
and dinner at jack's always ends with linda never coming back"

By the way, I didn't end up needing the rhyming dictionary for this lyric. Usually I do need one, especially when writing subsequent verses. So i stopped there. I left it there with the notion that the first verse would be about how couples are annoying because they fight all the time. The second verse will be about how couples are annoying because they're always getting all shma-shma and displaying their affections in front of our poor unfortunate bachelor. But, I left it there, wanting to work on the chords. This is where it gets tricky, though. How can I tell you about decisions I made regarding the harmony and melody without getting too technical. I think I'll take a bit of time to think about that and stop here. Plus, my eyeballs are frying out from so much writing. I'm sure yours are too if you've made it this far. So, we come to the end of part one. Ta!

Hi and welcome to my little blog. If you don't know me, my name is Mike. I write songs and things. I created this blog because lately I've been having a bit of trouble with writer's block. Perhaps it's the summer weather (or perhaps its the Playstation). Perhaps it's the fact that my summer job doesn't allow me much time to think about music. Regardless, I thought one way to...erm...unblock (aside from unplugging the Playstation) might be to make a journal of my creative musings. You know, whenever I come up with a song idea, or discover something significant to do with music making, I could write it down somewhere and have it to refer to when I get stuck. I used to do this a lot when I was doing Reclinerland alone, before it grew into a band and split into Parks & Recreation. Now I'm alone again, so I'm back to keeping a journal. Only, one of the attractive prospects of writing my thoughts on a blog instead of in a little book is that I can have people post feedbackand give me other ideas, etc. I'm hoping that will help. My larger goal is just to get myself thinking about things. If I can immerse myself in thoughts about making music, things will get moving. I'm not just going to post entries about music, though. I've been working on a film with my friends at Grammar School Pictures, so there will be some stuff about that. I just figure anything creative I do feeds everything else creative I do, so it should all be included. Ambitious? Yes. So welcome to my blog! Please post replies if you're interested. I welcome and comments you might have. More later!

Hello again. I'm supposed to be working on new songs for the next Ideal Home Music Library: Volume 2 (for those of you who don't know what that is, go to the website and have a look.) I don't think it undermines the verisimilitude of the story behind the albums to admit that I'm the author of the songs. Anyway, Volume 2 is going to consist of parlor songs, i.e., songs that were published in the late 19th/ early 20th centuries by sheet music publishers to be played in people's living rooms on the piano. So I have a mind to create a whole album of songs for just piano and voice. That is proving to be very challenging. It's one thing to write just the chords and vocal melody to a song and present that to other people to put on parts, like you do in a band, but when it's up to you to come up with the bass line, fill in the inner voices, voice the chords, etc., and all in the context of what two hands can do on a keyboard: whoah!

So I figured one way to get insight into what the piano can do is to listen to and play more piano music. I know that's no great revelation. Bear with me. In my CD collection I have the Gosford Park soundtrack, which features some songs written by Ivor Novello for piano and voice. I also have the Dichterliebe and Liederkiessby Robert Schumann. I have the scores for the Schumann music, so I can study the scores and get some ideas as well. I also have lots of sheet music collections which I can look at to get ideas. The main point is to surround myself with the music, so that I can absorb its gestures and then start to use those gestures to make the songs. So when am I going to start doing that? Listening to piano music is no problem. In fact it's quite easy to do. It's the playing part that I struggle with. But I'm working on that too. Every day this summer I've been practicing for two hours a day. I've been doing all of the major and melodic minor modes, chords, and major and minor arpeggios in one key a week. Then I play the blues and Rhythm Changes in that key. Then, I work on some pieces. The pieces I'm studying right now are Bill Evans' Waltz For Debby from one of his intermediate solo books, and also a Bach prelude and Fugue, I think it's number 20. These are the two pieces I tanked during my juries last term. The fact that I tanked them has me all in a tizzy to get them sounding really good. I made it my goal to at least finish the fugue by the end of the summer. Anyway, then, if I have time, I move on to playing random things on the piano. Now I have to add to that studying scores for the purpose of creating these songs. You can see why I'm feeling a little dizzy.