“Don’t you just let ‘em treat you like a fool”
SONGWRITING
October 2013. This song came up as an experiment. I had already started the music production private lessons back then and I needed to put some ideas in order. I had had the melody of the chorus running in my head for a long time and the idea of starting the song with the word “welcome” in the first line so that I could suddenly break the harmony of this invitation in the second line right after. Those two basic ideas were crucial to developing the rest of the song. Later, I added the metaphor of the circles as a way of showing that there are infinite points of view and perspectives and that we can’t simply divide things into two categories as we usually tend to do. The melody of the beginning of the verse was inspired by a song called La Turmis, from the first album of the Spanish band Dover, which became very popular in the nineties. The structure of the chords, which is repeated along with the whole song except for the break after the second chorus, was a pretty random and spontaneous choice. Most of the songs in this album have similar chord structures, taking into account that I don’t know much about playing the guitar yet. Besides, writing the lyrics and melody first and adding the chords later makes it hard for me to explore new and unusual chords. But I continue learning and I hope I get to know different ways of writing songs in the future, so they don't end up being repetitive structurally and melodically.
PRODUCTION
For this song, the producer asked me to add a third chorus (the original demo had only 2 choruses). That consequently meant a change in the lyrics so that the idea of showing an evolution along the song would remain coherent. In fact, this is probably one of the songs in the album that best shows this concept: none of the choruses has the same lyrics but they do keep similar structures in order to turn the negative meaning of the beginning around and make it positive at the end of the song. To me, this song has also similarities in the lyrics with the movie script structure theory of Syd Field and its turning points. Just like in a movie, I’m telling a story. There's a narrator, which is the singing voice in this case, and also the main character, which is the person the song is addressed to. As the lyrics of the song advance, we enter into the extraordinary world from the ordinary world and, once the story goes from being narrated personally to turning into the imperative mode, these two ideas get reunited together in the third chorus, showing new learning and perspective and turning its whole meaning around. So, I guess that this is somehow my personal way of wanting to show the world how art and reality get often mixed up, how they influence one another. and how fiction and fact can be hard to distinguish sometimes. If I had to go further, I could even say that this song is a message that I am sending to a future version of myself in a different time and space, but that would be a lot harder to explain.
Concerning the instrumental, this has been made by the producer, mostly. Both the introductory bass riff and the electric guitar solo after the second chorus are composed by him and I personally think they fit in very well with the song.
No comments:
Post a Comment