A Day of Music
Since I’ve been so busy with CrippleBush lately, I’ve neglected the hell out of Divided Front. Today, I tried to remedy that. I planned on re-recording a handful of tunes but, now that the day is done, I managed three. It amazes me sometimes how I manage to piss my time away without accomplishing anything substantial.
As it is, I’m glad I managed the three tunes. I took a decent chunk of time to tab out “Down and Out in New York City” … it’s been bugging me for so long that no one else in the world has tabbed the song.
It isn’t laziness that kept me from doing myself, though. I can pick out a song, find the notes, figure out the riffs and fills, the chords and the melody … but it’s such an arduous, harrowing process. It doesn’t come easily for me. I don’t pick the correct notes right off and blaze through a tune in minutes. I have to painstakingly dissect it, find a sequence of notes and then use that to determine the key and, from there, I start to learn the song.
I have a propensity to label a note as sharp if it’s not A B C D E F or G … in the case of “Down and Out” I realized my error pretty quickly; the sequence of notes didn’t make sense so I changed the sharps to flats and pretty quickly figured out the key was Bb minor.
Still, I’m disappointed I didn’t get more done. It’s midnight now and I’ve been at the task of recording for most of the past 12 hours. In addition to what I mentioned above, I also wrote lyrics for music I’d written ages ago. I’d written lyrics for it when I’d originally composed the song, but the tune didn’t sit right with me and my bandmate. Musically, I think the song is killer … but it’s been a bitch to match with lyrics. I wrote four distinct sets of lyrics for the tune and I think I finally nailed it.
My upstairs neighbor is creepy. He wears boots all the time, never takes them off … I know this because he follows me around my apartment. If I go to the bathroom … clomp, clomp, clomp — he follows. Living room …. clomp, clomp, clomp — and when he’s put himself in the same room of his that I occupy on the floor below, he just stands there in absolute quiet. It is unendingly, unnervingly creepy.
So the fourth set I wrote are lyrics about my psycho neighbor.
The problem is that I’m too afraid to sing it; he’ll probably come down and murder me if he overheard.
Tags: composition, creep, CrippleBush, Divided Front, Down and Out in New York City, lyrics, music, music-theory, psychopath, tablature