The 50/90 Challenge started a couple of days ago. The Challenge is to write 50 songs in 90 days.
I took part last year, and wrote loads of great songs (and a few silly ones). But the ones that really caught my imagination were the 12-second songs I wrote right at the end. So this year I’m writing short songs. Not 12 seconds, but definitely under a minute.
I’m going to find 50 brilliant tweets and set them to music. I’m calling it Tweet Suite:
Help me find the best tweets
So far I’ve found a few sites that claim to list the “best tweets”, but none of them have really delivered what I’m looking for. Maybe you can help. I’m not after funny tweets – setting them to music would be weird and horrible. I’m looking for the kind of tweets that make Twitter seem worthwhile. The tweets that inspire you. The tweets that restore your faith in humanity without being humourless. You know what I’m talking about.
You can submit tweets (or tweeters) to me in a few different ways:
I’ll put up a page with the candidates and the songs as I write them once I’m a couple of weeks into the challenge. Wish me luck, and keep your eyes open for brilliant tweets…
I love AudioBoo. It’s a wonderfully simple app, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to use it as a songwriter.
In case you haven’t come across it, AudioBoo is an iPhone app that lets you record a short podcast (5 minutes max), title it, tag it, attach a photo and upload it straight to the AudioBoo website, which is set up like Twitter (you follow people, they follow you, everyone has a party, etc.).
Idea 1: An insight into the songwriting process
My first inclination was to record song fragments or ideas as I write them. It’s a romantic idea, that listeners could have a direct line into the songwriter’s head as he toys with fully-orchestrated sections of potential song. But that doesn’t really fit my way of writing. I tend to have an almost complete lyric before I start strumming, and a podcast of me reciting half-written lyrics doesn’t sound great. It’s not that I’m precious about my unfinished works (I tend to publish first, rewrite later), but a photo of a notebook or a Tumblr post would be more useful than AudioBoo.
Idea 2: Bootlegging and reviews
Secondly I tried AudioBooing gigs. I recorded one on the way to see Little Feat, with the intention of using AudioBoo to capture the atmosphere of the gig later. But I was having too much fun to bother fiddling with technology, and there was zero signal in the Academy anyway. And if I can’t upload straight away, I lose the motivation pretty quickly.
I had more luck at an acoustic Stornoway gig at the Rusty Bicycle, where I embarrassed my brother by sliding my iPod Touch across the floor (Ghostbusters style) to record a song before videoing it with the N95 in one hand and taking stills with the ES400D in the other. Because the gig was completely acoustic and I was two feet from the band I could get decent recordings of Fuel Up and We Are The Battery Human. But I don’t think AudioBoo is going to be the next killer bootlegging app.
Idea 3: Covers and quick demos
I was working on a cover of The Beatles’ It Won’t Be Long for Roger and Dave’s Complete Beatles On Ukulele project, and my third AudioBoo strategy was to record a quick version of that mid-rehearsal. That worked pretty well, helped by Colt Seavers‘ AudioBooTH project, which gives context to musical and art-related boos (and happened to be in the middle of a “covers” week). A few days later I recorded a Sunday morning cover of a Little Feat song. I think using AudioBoo to record quick and dirty versions of songs (covers or not) is something that I’ll be playing with more.
Idea 4: New life for unsung classics
I had an idea a while ago that I could use AudioBoo as a dumping ground for the best of the old, unfinished songs that don’t make it onto albums and websites. I occasionally listen back my archives of demos and experiments, and I always come across something brilliant. It might not be a polished recording. It might not even be much of a song. But it’s a snapshot of a particular interesting moment.
I guess it’s like the “outtakes and B-sides” you get on albums and DVDs. There’s something very immediate and personal about them. Thinking about it now, some of my favourite albums are made up of tracks that didn’t make the cut. Hoy Hoy is a wonderful Little Feat double gatefold album of live tracks, demos, alternate takes and b-sides. Naked Baby Photos is the same for Ben Folds Five. In the post-album digital chaos of ihatemornings.com, maybe AudioBoo can be my outlet for outtakes and B-sides.
On the train home from work my iPod shuffled me up a song I wrote for the 50/90 challenge last year, and which never made it onto my website. It’s called Putting Your Hand In The Blender Again, named after a phrase my girlfriend uses to describe somebody revisiting a bad relationship. In a fit of excitement I recorded a quick intro, then rummaged around for some jack-to-phono leads, plugged my laptop into my stereo, plugged my stereo into my iPod and recorded the song into AudioBoo in glorious hi-fi stereo:
Getting a line input into AudioBoo
If you’re an AudioBoo user, you might be wondering how I managed to get a line in to AudioBoo. It just records from the mic, doesn’t it? Not if you have a 1st Generation iPod Touch and a MicroMemo mic. This random combination gives you a stereo mic or line level input into which you can plug just about anything. I’ve bookmarked a couple of useful links to get you going.
If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch you can get AudioBoo from the App Store (for free!), and if you don’t you can still check out my boos on the website.
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Beaten Up was an exercise in textbook songwriting, and it turned out really well. It doesn’t push any boundaries, and it’s not edgy in the slightest, but it works as a song. And I like it.
I’m trying to relate each of these articles to an aspect of songwriting or creativity. This one is about writing songs by the book.
Starting with the title
During the 50/90 I was very good at always having my notebook to hand so I could record title ideas. I overheard someone say they felt “beaten up” and wrote it down. When I sat down with a guitar to start writing the song I wanted to find the perfect way of setting the title, so I spent a while singing “Beaten up” to a load of different tunes and rhythms. It’s always a good idea to try to match the contour and rhythm of natural speech for a title. It doesn’t always work, but it’s a good start. In this case, it was perfect. By this time I was singing “Beaten up and beaten down”, which I liked. Say it aloud, and you’ll naturally raise the pitch on “up”, and lower it on “down” because of the structure of the phrase. It’s a bonus that the cheesy word-painting is built in…
Textbook structure
With the chorus saying (essentially) “I feel crappy”, I started building a structure around it based on the tried and tested “contrasting sections” model. If the chorus is set in the present, you set the verse in the past or future. The chorus is a general statement, so the verses deal with specifics. The chorus melody goes quite high, so the verse melody is lower. And so on. I ended up with something like this:
Verse 1: I’m sitting around with friends telling sad stories about you.
Chorus: I feel crappy.
Verse 2: I’m trying to think of a fun story but I can’t.
Chorus: I feel crappy.
Bridge: I just want to be able to tell them something great about you.
Chorus: But I feel crappy.
Simple yet effective. There’s no need to over-complicate song structure. In fact, it’s usually a bad idea. People have very specific ideas of what to expect from a song, and usually you only ever want to surprise them with one aspect. Pop songs are all about familiarity.
Chord progressions
I wanted this to be a real campfire strumalong of a song, so I went with some classic progressions in D. The verse progression (G, D/F#, Em, D) was straight from Van Morrison’s Caravan (the Last Waltz version with The Band, obviously ;o).
The bridge (D/F#, G, A, D/F#) was a slight variation on the Alanis Morissette Ironic chords with the classic guitar trick of holding the same notes on the top two strings and changing the bass note. I like a bridge that teases you with inversions, never quite hitting the root of chord I, so when the chorus kicks in you get a real sense of return. If I had used a straight D chord at the end of the bridge progression you would get the feeling that it was complete without another chorus, and that’s not good. A bridge’s only harmonic function is to make you ache for the chorus.
The only harmonic surprise in the chorus is the F#7 chord on “back around” (lifted from Ben Folds – think Tom and Mary) that gives the section a bit of character that it might otherwise have lacked.
Melody
The melody is quite simply built around the chord notes, but it has a couple of good hooks: the title line, and the “sick and tired” line, which I used as a piano hook to tie it all together. My favourite thing about the melody is the rhythm. It sings really easily, and I spent ages getting all the lines to scan perfectly. Sometimes that means ditching great ideas because their syllables just don’t fit. But you end up with a song that sounds familiar, catchy and easy to play along to. Beautiful campfire fodder.
