Finishing decade old songs
There are a few songs I wrote that I remember by heart from when I first learned guitar. It’s been around 20 years now and I have around 3 songs that I could finish based on memory and d recordings.
Recently I took the backbone of an old ambient song written in 2004 and adjusted the arrangement to add a few parts, add lyrics, and now it’s ready to be released on my first EP.
Very old songs are difficult to finish for me because I cannot let go of their original meanings and the headspace I was in when I wrote them. As I progress through the process of completing my first LP as Moss I am finding that I’m beginning to be able to let go of some of that and recontextualize the meanings of these songs. To really divorce them from what was intended and look at them from a more clinical perspective.
I ask myself:
- What does this song feel like today
- If I came up with this music today, what would I want it to express? It may be the same emotion but not the same situation, theme, or story that came with the original mindset
- Can I improve it?
- Can I add an arrangement around this or is it a dead end riff?
I have a few old songs I’d like to get back to eventually. Thanks to my excellent record keeping (when it comes to my artistic output) I have demos, maybe lyrics, chord progressions, and sometimes tabs written out for these songs. It’s funny that some are so old that they’re on cassette tape. Not even recorded on a 4 track but just an old cassette recorder my parents had at home. Some come from when I used to plug this cheap AudioTechnica microphone directly into the 3.5mm jack of my 1999 Windows ME (millennium edition) laptop and record right into Audacity thinking I was somehow getting close to how real studios did things.
What are the songs?
Well, since I know you’re just dying to know and this post isn’t purely me masturbating to my own nostalgia, I’ll tell you.
- A Steady Diet - this one is about a short time where I’d chain smoke and spend Fridays escaping my severe anxiety with my prescription benzos
- Thebaine, My Lover - I had a problem for a short time. Google what thebaine is a component of...
- ...hmm I know there’s more but that’s all I can think of now.
See you next time. I’m making progress on the LP so wish me luck in finishing this year.