...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.