western front

This time, I wrote a song on purpose, unlike the last one. Last Fall I stumbled across an interesting chord sequence that I did not think I had stolen from anyone. After coming up with a chorus, I struggled for a long time to come up with verses. Everything was wordy and I kept thinking I needed a bridge and I don't even really know what I'm talking about folks, so I lost steam. If I knew more about the structure of music, instead of just learning by playing other people's songs and noticing chord connections, this might not have been so difficult.

Anyway, after the burst of creativity I had the day before, I took a crack at this song on Friday, and came up with something much simpler than I had been attempting last year. I recorded pretty much everything in 1 or 2 takes using a free 4-track app on my smartphone that has start/stop, a dial for recording/volume level of each track, and a mute button for each track. The tracks are predetermined in length and have to be either 1, 3, or 5 minutes long. You use the mic in the phone and try to guess at distance vs. the volume of the ukulele/voice. When you like it, you tell the thing to "mix" the track and email it to yourself. That's it. It's very no frills.

So that, plus the fact that I've written one song in my life, literally the day before this one, which sounds like something a precocious bored child might create, should give you good reason to set your expectations nice and low for my 2nd song.