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Well, week 4 – Tech glitch meant the challenge was not posted during the time I had to work on it, such is life. And this one required research, thought – I am not unpacked yet from moving – So I started it on the GO train, going through notes and snippet-recordings from my phone and some of my ideas scraps of paper, pulling together pieces, hunched over a piano app and a notebook. Five different ideas strung together here. This is really just an almost blank canvas, the first few ideas thrown down and not yet organized. VERY ROUGH.   Not finished.

OMG – a COWRITE?  I have so little time, and I live in a new city now!   aaarrrggghhh!  so I posted right away and as luck would have it, Patricia Loranger answered the call – She came over, and brought biscuits, perfect!  I had the word Rattlesnake, she had an idea of a really nasty man who turned himself around – from there we went to people who are hard on the outside and soft on the inside, with a street-philosophy.  We began writing about the beginning of the nasty guy’s love affair with his wife, and then we turned it around and made the hard-on-the outside person the woman.  Patricia could not make the recording session, so once again I worked with John Jackson, who is a great guitar player, but in particular, a wicked slide player.  I tend to write songs with added bars and turnarounds and stops and starts, and John is getting used to my idiosyncracies, I think!  It was a tough session – I was finalizing rhythmic and structure things as we were putting down drum loops, but we got it.  The third line of the chorus Patricia and I had not quite finished ironing out – we had started with “I am your mistake to make – the rattlesnake”, but she didn’t like that, so I gave her a bunch of other ideas, one of the ones she liked was “Brave is what it takes to face” – in the end, I did three lead vocals, those two, and the third “Fear is just another taste”.  So we have a choice going forward.  In any case, good cowrite, met a new writer in my hood, done!

2nd week of the SAC 2016 songwriting challenge!  The challenge for this week was to write a story song that included conflict and resolution.  Wednesday was the time slot, and I had had this idea of writing about the emotional trajectory of the “empty nest”, so much more painful than the bird imagery.  I wanted to capture the awe of first being a parent, the hopes and excitement we have, the pride we have in our children, and the devastation when that relationship unravels.  In terms of the conflict and resolution themselves, I felt the conflicts of childhood are different from the conflicts of teenage/early adult years, and so I structured the song into two more or less equal parts of three sections each – the kid section, the interaction section and the parent section, which I saw as setup (verse), conflict (prechorus-ish), resolution (chorus). I had half an hour before the session, so I changed up a few lyric ideas an decided on a title…. and got in the car.

John Jackson helped to demo it.  He played the guitars, the bass and the strings, and did the engineering, and I played the piano pads!  (this is a big deal for me!) and we started with drum loops – but most of the song is in 4/4 and the chorus changes between 12/8 and 4/4, and we didn’t have a lot of time.  Choosing drum loops that work together over a tempo change is tricky.  We did the recording with the drums in and took them out of the mix.  I think we did a pretty good sketch, you get the picture, but I think this song would have benefitted from being jammed out with a drummer, a bass player and a pianist, because I think we captured some things about the piece, but we missed the mark on others.  I also did not have a lot of writing time, so we’ll see how/if it evolves over time.  John and I will go back in again some other time with fresh ears.

So here is Love knows Everything

The demo of what I posted yesterday – big, big thanks to the fabulous John Jackson for guitars, bass & engineering, oh and Madelon for lunch!

The first challenge of this year – under the wire – a few hours ago, I realized the deadline is tonight … as in not tomorrow night … is it 11:59 yet?   And I think I wrote my blog and posted it to the comments section of somebody else’s blog instead of onto the actual challenge site.  Stephan Petar-Goruvosa will be shaking his head, so old-school, OMG Jen…  but the point is to start somewhere.  In songwriting often the ideas we think my be the stupidest turn out to be the best, so I’m heeding my Grandmother’s advice on this one:  “If the soufle falls, call it a pudding and serve it with a flair!”

So here it is, “no inch, no mile”.  Fun, sassy, and a better recording will be made of it tomorrow

Thinking about words and the “real estate” in lines of music, the interplay of silence and noise, how emotion affects the rhythm of breathing…