What to when there’s nothing to do.  I suppose I could write a song.

When people ask me if I write the lyrics first or the music I will answer “yes”, but ‘yes’ doesn’t really tell the story. Sometimes I write some lyrics and then find some chord progressions and work out a melody. Other times I’ve got a bit of melody and need to wait for some words to fit. And sometimes the two happen simultaneously. But invariably the melody will lead to changes in the lyrics and vice versa. Often the process takes place over such a long time that it’s hard to work out what came first.

I’ve got a few songs that I sat down and simply wrote. Mostly they develop over time. Appreciation took quite a while.

At first it was a chord progression. It sounded good and I kept playing it. Little by little a bit of melody occurred to me. Then, walking on a street in Alice Springs, the first line occurred to me. Then I had a clue – this was a song about toxic busy-ness. I’ve always kept myself busy. There’s never enough time to do all the things I want to do or commit to do. Somehow most things get done, but in doing it all I’ve missed a lot. This is a song about a different possibility.

The chords, melody and lyrics of Appreciation are different to anything else I’ve ever done. When I post a song on SoundCloud or BandCamp they always ask me what genres the song falls into. I usually don’t know. I think I called Appreciation “Pop”, but that doesn’t feel quite right. I only arrived at it by identifying what genres it isn’t. Any suggestions?

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I had some feedback about this song.  One was a from a friend.  She didn’t like the song much, and the singing was even flat in parts.  So I listened again and discovered she was correct.  I’ve now reworked the vocal and hopefully it’s more in tune.  To my ears it’s better – hopefully it’s in tune.

The second bit of feedback was from a drummer friend of mine.  He said that the drumming was extremely busy – and it hurt the track.  I had another look and found that I’d inadvertently ran two different drum tracks on top of one another.  Neither track was too busy to my ear, but the two together were over the top.  I’ve cleaned that up but it still sounded a bit like drums being very busy.  It turned out that it was the guitar strumming that seemed to work with the drums to create that effect.  I turned the guitar down and applied a bit of reverb to it and hopefully got the balance right.

I’m fond of this track.  I keep working on it in hopes of one day getting it right.