talis_kimberley

...for the next project, that is.

I am so far behind on recording my writing output that it's going to be a massive undertaking to make headway on it. However, these last few weeks (barring missing a couple for illness) we have at least been managing some scratch tracks and some long-promised things, to get us back into the swing of recording. My voice isn't exactly the same as it was a few years ago, and my creative urges are always shifting too. 

So now I'm in an exciting place. I have a set of songs which to me constitute an album, and which were in the main written within a certain timeframe. Some themes recur in certain songs. Some of them I think are real gems - or will be, when I've done more work on the arrangement of them.

Ah, arrangement! What a stumbling block! It's one thing to write the lyric and the sung melody, and call that the song - so it is, so it is. To perform it will usually require accompaniment. I could strum some chords, but that's not an arrangement. That requires licks and twiddles and interesting chords, a hint of a harmony and a rhythmic surprise or two, and those things don't always come when I call.

I spent several days trying very hard to think of tunes to employ as the secondary melodies on this project - instrumental intros and so on - and for a while, every single tune I came up with was as pedestrian as Tufty the squirrel.

(For those of you reading that and thinking What?, replace Tufty with the Green Cross Man.)

A few days later I started getting ambushed by little bits of tune, and at last they were lively and interesting little bits of tune. I've a note of them as they emerge. A new guitar twiddle jumped out as well, and was promptly collared by one especially greedy song which already had a perfectly good accompaniment - now it has a further embellishment. Ah well.

I've been telling myself they'd come when I needed them and not before. Now comes all the cut-and-paste of what goes where, and how to turn a set of lyric-and-melody songs into a musical landscape.

Did I mention I was fired up to get going again? We set up the studio last night and put down four scratch tracks - an updated 'Icarus' Sister', 'Dead Susan', and the two brand new ones, 'Plum Velvet' and 'Being Eowyn'. Goodness but my voice is rusty... so I'm fixing that; I've tracked down my old singing teacher, who moved shortly after family stuff put music on the back burner more than a year ago, and with whom I had lost touch. We're booking up the next session and I shall be working hard. Likewise, my finger callouses are not happy with me, but they'll adapt.

It did feel good to be back in the studio setting, though, and we're intending that this become a regular date.

Well. Bit of a rollercoaster. I'm just back from this year's UK Filk Convention, and my head is spinning - in a good way. Quite apart from the fact that I got to watch my dear friend Rika perform the most fabulous pair of Guest of Honour sets - the first utterly stonking and energetic and thrilling, the second intimate and intense and compelling - quite apart from the fact that she covered three of my songs, beautifully, and made my cry by saying nice things about me as she did so, quite apart from the fact that several other people and entities performed songs of mine or parodies of them, quite apart from the fact that when Rika finished her explosive Saturday night set with my 'Paper Worlds', apart from all those, was the fact that on the strength of her and her band's performance she won a 'Best at Con' Sam award, and I got a 'Best Filk Gold (over four years old)' Sam award.

Apparently it's the first time the same song has won in two categories simultaeneously. 

Not that that was all; there was the usual reprise of the winners just before the closing ceremony, and Rika invited me to join her and the band onstage, and we shared the performance. However, she was playing guitar, so I - ha! - got to go hand-held with the mic and bounce about the stage rather. I had seriously Too Much Fun doing that, and it was one heck of a way to close the con, for me.

Let's see, if I recall correctly;

Rika sang my 'Still Catch the Tide', and 'Paper Worlds' and Crystal's German translation of my 'Highwayman'.
Mike Stein sang his wonderful and witty parody of my 'Archetype Cafe'.
The GKs sang my 'Fairytale of Die Hard' which was a lovely surprise.
The NMC sang Simon Fairbourn's arrangement of my 'Relativity Mall'. 
Kathy Songbird sang my 'Your Crimson Bride' in her set. 
Steve MacDonald sang my 'Still Catch the Tide' in the dead apple circle.

Have I missed anyone out?

I did do a one-shot, of 'Dead Susan', written for Girl Genius Seanan McGuire last Hallowe'en, and the vastly talented and lovely Tim Walker agreed to drum for me on no notice at all. I'm not sure how it came across - oh my, it's a long time since I was up there doing that, and I was out of practice with managing the nerves... my daughter was the only person in the room who had heard it before, and she was sitting with her Dad singing away on what is really NOT a very pleasant song... at least now she has some idea what I do, or what I can do. I was also given such an introduction for my one-shot as makes me want to cook a very nice dinner for the committee member in question...

Last year with its troubles sent music to the back of the queue in so many ways. This year's convention has inspired me tremendously, and left me with a wanting to do more of it - record some of my considerable backlog, and perform more at conventions again.

Oh, and as another side effect I have today written a couple of new songs as well. That feels indescribably good, because, you see, 'Dead Susan' was all I wrote over a period of more than twelve months, and that's a long gap even for me. These things have always ebbed and flowed, and when the tide is in it's lovely, and when the tide goes out, one can feel utterly bereft. Oddly over this last year, I haven't even missed music, which has been less painful than missing it would have been, but I had got to missing the missing, and felt it a bad sign that I could be so neutral about the absence of performing or writing at all in my life.

So I have now a number of projects in hand, which I need and intend to further over the coming months, which will I hope include plenty of recording.

Delightfully, the convention also included a great deal of pleasant chatting and renewing of friendships, and although I'm deeply sorry to have missed several sets which I had hoped to see, I can't regret what I did instead, which was as nourishing to my soul as the music I listened to was.

This evening I have played guitar till my fingertips hurt.

I have a suspicion that creativity actually becomes harder work the older one grows. I don't think my experience is unique by any means, and I'll be glad to see your perspective on it.

When I was oh, a teenager, and through my twenties, creativity was like air. I didn't have to think about it; I breathed it. Everything I heard, read, learned, did, saw or dreamed occurred on at least two levels, the realistic and the creative/symbolic. I'll admit, there were times I got a little carried away with my other worlds, but as a mixed-up teenager, that was a boon to my sanity and I don't regret it. 

It was like living in a house where one could see into other worlds when one drew the curtains or raised the blinds. Roses? Wolves. Gold. Drowning? Circles. Moon? Too easy - clockface, shadows, hourglass, harlequin, triptych, marionette, sundial, words, words, WORLDS. I swam in them.

Life gets more complex as we grow older. Families, jobs, houses, finances, all claim us, and occupy our minds. I think this is when our creative soul - like a garden - becomes crowded, shadowed, neglected - the light is blocked and less grows with each season.

It does not have to be so. Like an urban gardener scratching up a bed amongst broken swings and dustbins, much can still thrive there. Clear a space. Mark it out. Sacre it. Give it light. Visit it. It may be a while before you see seedlings, or have birds and butterflies visit you there to whisper their songs in your ears, but it can at least be a tranquil waiting, there with the sun on your face.

It seems my songwriting has woken up again - it's been a year and more, and there have been reasons, and it's welcome back. I shall now proceed to burble about what this means and how it works (in my head, anyway). 

It usually starts with a seed - a phrase, something misread, something seen, perhaps a juxtaposition, sometimes something you think somebody is going to say before the conversation takes a left turn and you're left with the ghost of a conversation... whatever it is, it shines like a dropped ring on the pavement. I pick it up and put it in my pocket. Every so often I take it out and look at it, and sooner or later, if it's viable, it'll sprout.

This is the best part, for me. This is the sweetest combination of anticipation and joy and blind inspiration. It's a heady mix. Sometimes, just occasionally, it grows all the way up into a song while I just hold it in my hands and breathe. More often, and this is as it should be, it grows for a bit and then slows, and then I need to shape it by hand the rest of the way. This part is fun, too, because it's like solving a puzzle; somewhere in there is the shape of the song, and it's my job to reveal it.

It isn't just the words, after all, and it isn't just the music, either. The form matters, and so does the voice, and the language-set, and the rhythm, and the rhyme structure or lack of it, and the angle.

I'm playing with angle right now. I've got a little sprouting thing of a song in my pocket, and it's just at the point where it wants me to take over and shape it the rest of the way.

I haven't decided the angle yet, not quite. It won't be 'There is a XXX' , because I usually prefer something a little more oblique. I've toyed with 'I am the XXX' and also with 'There was a XXX but there isn't anymore...' '...because of me...' , likewise 'There is a XXX but I didn't know it when I met it and I'm sorry now' and 'There is a XXX and it's what I become'. Then there's 'I wish I were like the XXX' and 'There is no XXX but I wish there were'.

You see? There are angles all the way round the subject, in at least three dimensions. Any of them may make a decent song. One of them will prove best for the subject in hand. Making decisions along the way and eliminating the less-good versions of it are how we get there.

Suddenly there are so many things to write about... a pocketful of seeds is a fine thing to have on a late October day.

...and I am floored to learn that I've been awarded a Pegasus for 'Best Writer / Composer' at this year's Ohio Valley Filk Festival.

Thank you so very much to the folk who made this happen, which is to say the Pegasus organisers as well as everyone who voted.

My congratulations to all the other winners! What a lot of great music there is out there!

...and what a lovely piece of news on this unremittingly grey day. I hope somebody out there has sunshine. We have the stove lit, and belting out a nice bit of fire for us.

Also, congratulations to Tim and Annie Walker, who are next year's guests at OVFF. I know they'll have a wonderful time, and so will everyone there.

It's been pointed out that the under-lyrics to some of the 'Archetype Cafe' songs are not published on the website songbook. They aren't in the sleeve notes either, because I'm tricksy that way.

I've always had a fascination for secrets and codes. Did anyone else set up secret societies as a child? Repeatedly? Aligned to whatever was the current infatuation or best-beloved book? and as for codes, well, I'm not terribly good at solving them, but the idea of them appeals to me. I like layers in things. I adore the celestial geometry of the 'Holy Blood and the Holy Grail' sort, and yes, the Da Vinci codes was a romp. Remember, I devoured Kit Williams' glorious and utterly perfect 'Masquerade' at a very formative age. I hold fast the memory of performing my  'Jack Hare' to Kit himself at his studio once. And 'Templar Gold' comes out of that set of ideas as well.

Is it any wonder I hide words underneath other words? When, after all, are we ever really only saying one thing at a time?

It feels a bit like having a whole new room added to the house. I don't know what I sound like in here yet: Laaaaaaaaaaaa! 

Oh, right. This feels like somewhere I can sing.

But is it a room in which to wear plum velvet and sip sloe vodka? Or a room in which to wear my Improbable Rock Strides and let rip?

Pull up a chair and sit down, hey - I'll open the window and let in the garden. What shall we talk about first?