ALBUM RECOMMENDATION (Alanis Morissette - Under Rug Swept)

The first Alanis Morissette album I ever bought was So-Called Chaos and I liked it pretty much but it took me a little effort to get introduced to her musical universe at the beginning. It wasn’t until I bought this one, Under Rug Swept, that she caught my attention as a reference so that I could realize what an amazing songwriter and talented singer she is. I love her melodies and her voice very much but what I admire the most about her is her capacity to create easy-to-relate lyrics without needing to use typical metaphors or poetic words. There’s some science in her lyrics and I really like that. I like how words such as consciousness, orgasm, or democracy can fit in her structures and sound beautiful still. Another important factor that makes her songwriting so special is that she is very honest and sensitive and you can feel the strong emotions behind her songs in her voice and lyrics. At the same time, she is very self-deprecating and down to earth so everything in her works ends up being very coherent as a whole. Most people say that Jagged Little Pill is her best album and I can understand why. That album was like a fresh explosion of rage and it had a great impact in the 90s but with all due respect, I prefer her most pop-rocker side with albums like Flavors Of Entanglement or this one, which I’d claim is my favorite of her. From the introductory song, 21 things I want in a lover, a list of preferences about relationships with a very explosive rocker and catchy melody, until the last one, Utopia, a ballad in which her voice sounds beautiful and sweet. If you like elegant feminine pop-rock music with strong and deep messages in the lyrics, you will absolutely love this album!

Favorite songs: 21 things I want in a lover, Hands Clean, Unsexy, A man, You owe me nothing in return, and Utopia.

THE DIFFERENCE

SONGWRITING

When I started to make music and produce my songs, I just had this feeling that people were lying to me because I uploaded a lot of demos on Facebook and Youtube but nobody liked or commented on them and when I asked some of those people personally about the songs, it was like something uncomfortable that they didn’t want to deal with. I always thought it was because the voice sounded out of tune or maybe because they simply did not like it but there was still something weird about the whole situation. Sometimes it even seemed as if they were afraid. Even if they didn’t like the music, the voice, or whatever, I could not understand why they were not sincere about it and express their opinion, since they knew I would not have gotten offended if things were said in a respectful way. That’s how I started to develop the idea behind this song: The Difference.

The song was originally written with the intention of expressing this demand for honesty, screaming out loud to the world that I was not willing to stand for any of those people wanting to shut my mouth and that I was not going to keep any kind of envy or selfishness from fighting for my dreams. But the real meaning of the song goes further…

The Difference is about this lack of coherence we are all inevitably going to experience in life. The impossibility of wearing someone else’s shoes, the unbreakable duality of existence. We decode the mystery of the universe, the meaning of it doesn’t make sense anymore. We prove the existence of God, God stops existing. The more we know the truth, the more it turns against us. A song against labeling people being a label in itself.

I started writing the bridge and both lyrics and melody came at the same time. Then I added the verse, which was a little different lyrically in the beginning, and finally, I added the chorus, which melody came from a song I wrote when I was 15. I’d say that it’s not one of my best compositions but I like the fact that it ends up being pretty effective with all its simplicity. Less is more, as they say.

PRODUCTION

Once again, I recorded the song twice. The lyrics are a little dark but the melody of the song is very happy and catchy, so we raised the tone of the song so that the voice would sound brighter. I really like the final result and I would say that it’s one of my favorite songs vocally speaking.

FIGHT CLUB Tribute

Fight Club is not only another very well-shot movie with excellent cinematography or script from the great David Fincher, it is much more than that… It’s a movie that, aside from being all metaphoric but very explicit at the same time, causes the spectator multiple feelings and emotions. You can love it or hate it but it doesn’t cause you any type of indifference. 

As I said, there’s no doubt about the talent that David Fincher has to manage to create perfect shots beautifully colored and coherent with the content, just like it usually happens in most of his movies, but the greatest thing about this movie is its capacity of transcending and being universal without needing extraordinary characters or sceneries, meaning that they’re all common and decadent but that’s what makes them special. With all their gloom and pathos, they are superheroes in the end.

There are tones of black humor and the dialogues are so peculiar that you never know what to expect. The whole story in itself is very extravagant and unbelievable and, although you may not understand what’s going on most of the time, you can follow it easily because the narrative is fluent and catches your attention. Obviously, a second watch is necessary to understand the movie better but this is one of those films that captivate you enough from the very first time to keep on watching without understanding exactly what is all about. I think it can be considered a masterpiece and, of course, it is one the clearest examples of what a cult movie is.

THESIS

I think this movie is a critique of violence and how competitive and cruel society has ended up turning to be nowadays. There are a lot of references to consumerism and shallow advertisements and the “fight club” concept in itself, as well as the great ending of the movie, can be a metaphor for how the destruction of standards and labels is sometimes necessary to build a better world. 

The consumerist society we are living in and its standards of perfection are nothing more than an illusion we have created so that we don’t need to face the real truth about what really matters in life.

ALBUM RECOMMENDATION (PJ Harvey - Stories from the city, stories from the sea)

I remember buying this album in Carrer Tallers after having just moved to Barcelona when I was 18 and it was one of the greatest surprises of my life. I had only listened to White Chalk before, which was a very different album, kinda slow, so I didn’t expect something so rocker when I started listening to Stories from the city, stories from the sea. I was really impressed by the energy of the album from the very beginning and I also remember feeling very thrilled after having listened to the first song of the album, Big Exit, with those rocker guitars and that final line in which her voice turns extremely powerful. 

I think it is one of the best works ever made in music history and each and every song on the album is amazing, they all could have been a great choice as singles. I still listen to the album today and feel amazed by its perfection. The videos are great too, especially Good Fortune and This Is Love, in which she looks very sexy. 

A masterpiece of female rock music!

Favorite songs: Big Exit, Good Fortune, A Place Called Home, The Whore’s Hustle And The Hustle’s Whore, This Mess We’re In, and This Is Love.

THE WALL

Songwriting

The idea behind this song came after listening to the great song of the 80s Tainted Love by Soft Cell. That catchy and epic melody really inspired me and I wanted to do something similar, so I started to write the lyrics of the verses and later I added the chorus, which was originally the bridge of another song of mine. Writing the songs for this album has been like putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle because I had lots of ideas that I had been accumulating over the years and now they have finally taken shape. For me, singing and writing songs was some kind of repressed desire because I was being bullied in high school and people made me feel like I wasn’t worthy, so I used to spend hours locked in the bathroom listening to my favorite albums and singing along to get rid of my demons but it was something I would always do like secretly and this song is about not willing to repress my instincts anymore. It has a lot to do with this awakening I’ve been experiencing for the past few years in which I’ve started to produce songs and I’ve realized that this is what makes me happy no matter what other people say. I may not be the best singer but I do not give up on trying to improve day by day. Singing is not just a craving for me, it is an essential need like breathing or drinking water and I’ve always had the theory that if you feel it inside and you need to do it, you are a real singer, no matter what other people think. It’s like what Whoopi Goldberg says to one of her pupils in Sister Act 2, quoting a famous writer: “If when you wake up in the morning, you can’t think of nothing but writing, then you’re a writer”. So, with this song, I’d like to give a similar message to those people who feel the same way about singing and encourage them to never give up on what they like doing only because some other people criticize it, because criticizing is an easy thing but being brave enough to follow your dreams is what makes the difference.

Production

This song was recorded two times, just like some others on the album, and I like the final result rather than the first one recorded but I have to admit that the voice could sound better, though. It’s a difficult song to sing because the notes of the chorus are pretty high and long but I’m proud, anyway, of the composition in itself and I’m learning little by little to love my voice and its tone. 

500 DAYS OF SUMMER TRIBUTE

I got to know about this movie when I was in Barcelona coursing the third and last year of my cinema degree. The person I was in love with was a big fan of the movie so I wrongly thought it would be a good idea to watch it, not for being a bad movie, but because of the pain this fact implicated. I was being rejected by someone I was desperately in love with, so I guess that somehow I could relate my experience to the main character’s. This made me feel sad and I guess that’s one of the reasons why I couldn't really appreciate the movie and I haven’t watched it since then. Anyway, I have to admit that it’s a great movie and it contains diverse elements that make it very original and different from other romance movies. It clearly wants to destroy the conventional schemes of the typical romantic comedy, being one of them in itself at the same time. I think that it can be considered a cult movie too: the dance scene, the mix between real image and cartoon, temporal jumps in the structure of the script, memorable dialogues and characters, attractive typography… they all combine fluently. I think that it is also a very personal movie, which is very important when you want to make a difference in art because this gives it a unique personality.

For this tribute video, I used the song Numbness, which is about the depression you can get to feel when you are rejected by someone you love. The lyrics mention a bench, just like in the scene in which the main character sits and reencounters the girl, the melancholic music combined with strong scene shots of the movie and, obviously, the fact that this song is about that guy I was in love with and who likes this movie, made the decision of using this song and movie together for the video pretty evident.

THESIS

In this case, the thesis is very clear, though it has a double meaning or interpretation. It is determined at the ending of the movie, as usual, when the main character decides to give love another chance. On one hand, this could be interpreted as self-denial, since the search for the perfect love has always been an idealized concept by most people. On the other hand and with a rather positive lecture, it could mean that love is something we build on little by little and work at constantly and we should never give up on fighting for it. I’d rather believe the second lecture is the right one.

Thesis: Love and relationships will always be a worthwhile experience, no matter how much pain they implicate.

ALBUM RECOMMENDATION (Anouk - Sad Singalong Songs)

I really admire Anouk and I love each and every album she has released, but I think she made a real difference with this one, not only about her own music but about the way it was released and the audiovisual content that accompanied the album. Speaking concretely about the music, this album is 100% conceptual: each song is linked to one another with ambient sounds and all of the songs are sad and melancholic, even mysterious some of them. She is telling us a story about the search for light and happiness, so the tracks go from dark to brighter as they advance until we get to the final song and its epic ending. Everything is very connected, both music and lyrics, and Anouk’s voice sounds amazingly beautiful and full of emotion in every note. She’s proved that she’s great at singing ballads, aside from the rock and roll that she gets us used to. As I said at the beginning, the videos are amazing too and they deserve a special mention. It’s four music videos all connected in between by stories, characters, symbols… the same actors playing different roles, similarly to the American Horror Story Tv show. For me, everything related to this album can be considered a MASTERPIECE. Best Anouk album ever (and it’s hard to choose) and one of the most original and conceptual ideas ever made in the past years.

Favorite songs: All of them!

NUMBNESS

"You won't come, you won't care if I live or die today"

SONGWRITING

As I explained in the post about the song Catharsis, the idea of Numbness came from a desire of transmitting a real deep melancholic feeling. I am a really melancholic person and this remains reflected in some melodies of my songs and the lyrics too. In this particular case, I needed to express a feeling of absolute powerlessness but from a sad and rather vulnerable perspective this time, instead of being inspired by the usual angry rocker mood, as lots of songs on this album have been conceived and recorded.

The story behind this song is pretty simple and literal. I was deeply in love with that guy who told me I was crazy and I couldn’t do anything else but to accept it the way it was. That led me to an empty state of mind where my feelings had to be numb in order to survive and, though I was feeling that way, I had to carry on with my life at the same time one way or another, so I was experiencing a real contradiction in my own skin, living a life that was not worthwhile for me anymore. 

But to speak more precisely about the concrete event that inspired this song, I must go back to a July day in 2012. I was living in Barcelona and I had just finished my cinema director career, so I used to go clubbing with some schoolmates to celebrate the end of the course. One night, I met a guy who had a really gay look and he was very handsome too. I flirted with him despite the fact that he said that he was not gay. However, everybody around me thought the same and said to me that he was clearly gay. At the end of the night, he became really violent and started to break bottles and insult people, so I decided to give that flirting up. I felt simply stupid and pathetic because I had spent the whole night trying to get laid with that guy only to forget about the other guy but, in the end, it was me the one who was alone one more night, as usual.

I sat alone on a bench on the street, feeling completely empty. I had never felt that empty in my whole life. There was absolutely no point in anything. I sat there for at least one hour, watching people walking by and expecting someone to stop and tell me: “Are you ok?” Obviously, no one did because they were exactly as empty as I was, or, at least, that’s the way I felt it. I wanted to cry but I couldn’t, I wanted to scream and I couldn’t either. I just wanted to feel something, I wanted to feel real and, in the end, the only thing I could think about was the guy I was in love with, wishing that he would suddenly appear to give me a strong hug.

Fortunately, I also knew that that horrible moment could be reflected in a song and it did. Art has always been my greatest escape and will always be.

PRODUCTION

This song was directly recorded with a higher key. I wanted to record the verses again before releasing it because I wanted the voice to sound more whispered but I finally decided to leave it this way and, though the voice doesn’t exactly sound the way I like in the verses, I think you can find beauty in the imperfections sometimes and I also really like how the voice sounds in the choruses and the final high note.

HIGH TENSION (Switchblade Romance) Tribute

I watched this movie during more or less the same period of months that I watched Cube. I got to know about it thanks to that horror movies website that I mentioned in the previous post and I rented it from the older movies section of the video store too. At first, I thought that it would be like some kind of Tv movie with a poor story and aesthetic but I was completely wrong. Watching this movie was a true EXPERIENCE. I had never seen anything like that before and it could be considered my first introduction as the spectator of this gore torture porn sub-genera that movies like Wolf Creek, I Spit On Your Grave or Martyrs have offered over the past decade.

The best aspect of the movie is the cinematography and the realization of the tension scenes, which are shot in a very original and realistic way. The movie makes clear the honor of its title because, once the action starts, the tension never lows until the ending. You can really feel the danger and worry about the characters, mainly because of the brilliant choice of shootings. The performances are great too, especially the one given by the protagonist. 

The worst part of the movie with no doubt and many people will surely agree, is the ending. We have seen a lot of turning-tables endings and it’s fine if you know how to solve it in a subtle and coherent way but it doesn’t work at all in this movie. Many people think that this ending ruins the whole movie and I can completely relate to that claim because, after having seen such great tension scenes, you feel fooled by that ending and it pisses you off. However, it can’t be denied that eluding the ending, it is still one of the best horror movies ever made and one of my favorites too.

THESIS

I would say that the thesis of this movie is similar to the one that I exposed in the Black Swan post. Once again, you deal with mental illness or psychotic break, and, for me, it’s pretty clear that it has something to do with the self-repression suffered by the main character and her obsession with her friend.

Thesis: The repression of our deepest instincts may be one of the causes of some mental illnesses.

ALBUM RECOMMENDATION (Garbage - Version 2.0)

Garbage is an amazing band and clearly one of my favorites. They have always been very faithful to their music style, so it gets very hard to choose one of their albums as their best because all of them are true pieces of art but, if I had to choose, I would say that Version 2.0 is their best album. One of the reasons is that I equally love each and every track of the album. It’s not that I don’t like some of the songs on the other albums, I would even dare to say that there’s not any bad Garbage song in their discography, but the songs in Version 2.0 are really great compositions. They are all very catchy and entertaining to listen to. The production of the album is amazing too. I don’t know much about the subject but I’d say that I love the electronic sounds and the distortions, something very characteristic of the band that gets very harmonic in this album. Then there’s also the fact that these songs were used in lots of movies and TV shows and it brings me really good memories: Sleep Together was used on the trailer of Cherry Falls and the amazing guitar solo of Push It sounded on the trailer of Teaching Mrs. Tingle, You Look So Fine was part of the soundtrack of Queer As Folk… It’s clearly a piece of the cult of the 90s and most of the songs on the album are iconic and representative of that era. Essential for any nostalgic lover of the 90s!

Favorite songs: I Think I’m Paranoid, When I Grow Up, Special, Push It, The Trick Is To Keep Breathing, Sleep Together, Wicked Ways, and You Look So Fine.

MAD IN LOVE

"I should've known before that this was never my fault"

SONGWRITING

As with many of my songs, the original idea comes from the strong need of expressing my feelings of powerlessness about love or society and a melody running through my head. In this case, I was inspired by a song by Dover titled The Hitter, which starts directly with the first line of the lyrics being sung very rapidly, without an instrumental intro. This suggested to me a very overwhelming way of expressing rage, which was exactly what I needed to speak, once again, about a frustrating relationship. 

I was in love with a guy who told me, in a very cruel way, that I was sick when I confessed my feelings to him. He really made me feel like I was a terrible human being for being in love with him, so the message that I wanted to transmit with this song was that, even though I became obsessed and mad about that, it was self-evident that my only crime was falling in love or having feelings for him while he was being very cruel and disrespectful to me and he took advantage of that to hurt me.

The song went through diverse phases during the songwriting process. The word "play" from the bridge was very clear and the lyrics, in general, were always pretty clear but the melody, especially in the verses, suffered a lot of changes. In the beginning, the notes were in a higher key but when the producer sent me the instrumental he had made I had to change it in order to adapt it, so the notes of the verses ended up being sung in a lower key.

PRODUCTION

This was one of the songs that I wanted to record one more time with a higher key because the voice sounded too low but, after showing the song to my guitar teacher, who said that he liked the song with that key, I decided to leave it that way. And I think he was right because, according to the subject of the song and the fact that there are already other songs with higher keys, it’s fine that there is at least one song on the album that sounds different from the rest.