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Working on new track.

Experiment with different writing approaches/ collaborating with peers.

Perform in LPW.

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This week I decided to work collaboratively with my classmate Roddy. Co-writing is something I have very little experience with and I felt super excited by the opportunity.
I approached Roddy with a melody idea and being a keys player he began working out some chords to support this. However, through ad-libbing over the top of these chords the original melody idea evolved to be entirely different. We were excited by it and decided to roll with it. Our tutor Hannah suggested we started writing lyrics from a single word, building a concept from there. She gave us the word 'jealous' and pretty instantly we had a clear vision of what we were writing about: miscommunication, confusion and jealously on both sides of a relationship.

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In class Roddy and I continued to play with improvising over the chord structure we had come up with, writing the melody and lyrics as we went. We worked really well together, bouncing ideas off of each other and writing freely and organically. We had the idea of there being this literal conversation happening lyrically, highlighting the two points of view on both sides of a relationship. We decided to give these space by having a verse each, joining together for more of a chorus section. When discussing where we felt we wanted the melody to go and how we wanted the song to flow we were heavily inspired by the artist Daniel Caesar, particularly his song 'Best Part' (Caesar, 2017). Having similar music tastes, we both appreciate Caesar's use of jazzy melodic contour and falsetto.

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Lyrically our main aim was to to tell a story; a story of confusion and frustration, but primarily, of love. We wanted there to be a sense of pain on both sides, as if they knew what they needed from each other but didn't know how to both communicate or facilitate these needs. We used very loose rhyming patterns with most phrases only sharing a similar vowel sound e.g 'paralysed' and 'night' - sharing an 'I' sound. This isn't something we focussed on very deeply, we were more enjoying the process of writing quickly and expressively. However in retrospection, with the top-line being relatively lazy and free-flow in the first part of the first verse, the lack of rhyme isn't particularly noticeable and I feel the lyrics work quite nicely.

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After class Roddy and I continued to work on the song, adding a second verse and a middle 8 section. We worked out some harmonies for the 'da-da-da' sections which started sounding really nice.

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Above is our LPW performance. We wanted to keep things simple for the house-band, having them keep time and playing the root note of the chords. This allowed for us to practice simply getting up on stage for our first performance of our careers at WaterBear. We were both really happy with how it went overall, our melodies sounded nice and we sung well together despite Roddy suffering with a throat infection. The feedback from the group was that the song could benefit from another section where everything opens up and it goes somewhere exciting. Something to experiment with!

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Things I'm happy with:

Melody in verses.

Lyrical concept.

Harmonies in 'da-da-da' section.

Still to do:

Add another section.

Think about adding instrumental layers.

Track it.

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[1] Daniel Caesar., 2017. Best Part. Available at: <https://open.spotify.com/track/1boXOL0ua7N2iCOUVI1p9F?si=11694d547aca4c3d> [Accessed 8 December 2021].

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Tracking vocals at Roddy's home set-up.