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This video is one of the first attempts at putting that music and the lyrics together.

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After deciding what didn't work and why, we altered the lyrics to these new and improved ones. In the photo, the lyrics highlighted in green are the improved lyrics and the annotations are why they are better

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To keep the characteristics of blues music in our rock song, we decided to make the lyrics raw, talking of hardships and longing for a better life to link to the lyrics of blues songs (as blues music originates from work songs sung by African slaves so many had melancholy lyrics about similar things). We went through different variations of lyrics however many didn't work as the lines were too long or had too many syllables and therefore didn't fit in with the quick pace of the song. This photo with lyrics highlighted in orange are lyrics that I suggested that didn't work or make the final cut and the annotations are why they didn't work.

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Once we'd decided on our musical inspirations and the genre we wanted our song to fit in to, we started to create the music of the song. We tried different chord structures and we tried playing different instruments until we settled on having a clean sounding guitar, a bass, a ukulele, vocals and for percussion we used an African Djembe drum and a cajon drum as we didn't want to overpower the other instruments with a full drum kit. I decided to play the cajon drum as I wanted to challenge myself and step out of my comfort zone (and I also will be taking part as a vocalist). Since most of our inspirations and genres we chose are rock based and rock has been influenced and originated from blues music, I tried to use a shuffle beat (which is a common feature of blues music) instead of a simplistic beat. This makes the song have a styled rhythm and makes the beat sound slightly syncopated and therefore gives it more of a bouncy feel. To keep the blues characteristics in the song I also suggested the idea to the guitarist Luke to add blues notes by bending certain notes using the guitar strings (specifically the 3rd, 5th or 7th note).

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To begin this topic, we were given the stimulus of "World Events". We made a brainstorm of different world events that we feel passionate about or that affect us as we decided to write an original song therefore it needs to be about something we all have feelings for. We wrote a list of topics that ranged from cultural appropriation to a fear of nuclear war due to the conflict between Donald Trump and North Korea. Finally, we decided that the topic we wanted to write about was drug abuse as we've all felt affected by this topic in some way and therefore have a passion to talk about it. This links to the stimulus of "World Events" as the use of drugs has increased in the world, especially in people our age (16-18 years old), so we believe it classes as an important (and almost taboo) topic that more people need to be aware of.

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- Me (Georgia Bué-Smith)
- Luke Eaton
- George Burton
- Melissa Cotton
- Dan Goodwin