Some of these ideas had been floating around in my head for a while - being in your late fifties will do that to you. Then on May 27 2018 the opening line fell together while I was driving. The key is avoiding the "cradle/grave" cliche, and this did it. Then another line came into my head, so I pulled over and made my personal attendant take some notes. When I got home I copied them over and added a few more. This was all mostly an incoherent series of "Closer to the x than the y" lines, but I realized I had two categories, in a sense - the relatively morbid ones, and the other perspective that forms the second half of the song. I scribbled a few half-assed lines that tried to bridge the gap between the concepts. Then, since recording everything I have been working on over an hour or two earlier wasn't enough, I guess, I grabbed my guitar and banged out a few simple chords to see if I could make vocal sense of the lines. Within minutes the thematic lines were getting easy to do, and without bothering to put any effort into it beyond experimenting with a minor 3rd and 6th - which completely did not work - I started just winging the other part over them, too. I kind of like it, although I think I want to put a lot more work into the words, not that that will change the gist of the song much. By the way, I think that at this point the "Found" is beginning to outweigh the "Lost". I had no intention whatsoever to write a "Lou Reed song". It was a complete coincidence. It's not my fault it sounds like him. It sounds uncannily like him.
And I have become comfortable of late - actually, going back to "Stupid Global Village" - with just trying simple three-chord structures as a way to figure out how some words might become a song.
The only serious issue that leaves me with is whether to work on it and change it enough so it no longer seems so derivative. Never fear, I will always keep a demo, at least, of this way of doing it available. I also might get over myself and keep it this way.
One thing that occurs to me as I put in some work to shift the overall sound of this - one aspect of which will be that I will generate a well-finished, polished piece of work - is that this style of performing or recording it is rather, um, lazy. It was literally the easiest way to go from a bunch of words on a page to something that could be called a song. I can do better than that.
© Huw Powell
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