1. Spinning Me. I wrote this song over the summer, and brought it into class. I wanted to write a song that closely resembled the genre of "funk," which is a favorite of mine. I had originally written the song on acoustic guitar--it's purpose was to add to the repertoire of songs I could perform on the street (one of my summer jobs), and so it had simple guitar accompaniment and a vocal part that would demonstrate my abilities. I started experimenting with the song in garage band, though, and ended up finding a bunch of pre-made loops that fit the song well, and so I turned it into a funk song. Overall, the song was pretty simple, but it was a good experiment to write a song in a genre other than what I am used to, as well as to find other accompanying instruments besides the simple guitar parts I've gotten used to writing.
2. Me and You. See Prior Post.
3. Counting On Tomorrow. See Prior Post.
4. Lovely with Rosalind's Bridge. See Prior Post.
5. Rosalind's Wake Up with My Bridge. See Prior Post
6. Sally. See Prior Post.
7. Wild Things. This song was a product of the assignment in which we were instructed to work in pairs to write a song. This assignment was initially challenging. I was paired with Jeremy, and it was difficult to know where to start when working with someone else I've never worked with before. Luckily for me, Jeremy had been working on a chord progression, and a really beautiful one at that. We didn't have to change anything. I came up with a melody, and we worked together on lyrics. The lyrics were the most difficult part. Writing lyrics alone is difficult enough when one is not inspired by something to write about, but writing with someone else proved to be even more challenging. Jeremy and I both have very different styles for writing lyrics, so we attempted to approach this task by choosing a general idea to focus our lyrics on. We chose the movie Where the Wild Things Are, which had just come out, and wrote lyrics about some of the major themes. Neither of us were too satisfied with our original set of lyrics, but for the final concert we edited them and I feel more confident with the final product.
8. Stronger Than Reason. This song responded to the assignment in which another student assigned us a narrative to inspire a song. Ben assigned my narrative, but his assignment was a little unconventional. He instructed me to write a set of lyrics about anything, and then translate them online into Japanese and then to English again, back and forth until the translation had met an equilibrium. The product would be the lyrics used for the song. I decided my original lyrics should resemble a cheesy love song--I wanted to have the simplest lyrics to start with and see how crazy they would be when translated. The resulting lyrics were very nonsensical. I wasn't that happy with the final song product, as I felt it was too over-the-top in silliness. Before the final concert, however, I recorded this song, and changed up just a few of the lyrics to make it flow better. The lyrics still make no sense, but they made a bit more musical sense. I had recently been studying schizophrenia in a psychology class--one of the symptoms of which is the production of "Word Salad," which is grammatically correct, nonsensical sentences. I justified my nonsensical lyrics by imagining they were written by someone who was severely schizophrenic and in love, trying desperately to communicate her affection while handicapped by this cognitive disability.
9. Ain't So Bad. This song fit the assignment to write a "Billboard hit." I chose to write in a style that I've seen as somewhat trendy these days--female singer-songwriter types writing about their emotions and using lots of vocal ornamentation. My song was very simple and predictable in structure and chord progression, as are most pop songs I know of, and I performed it using a cheesy pop percussion loop.
10. All Be Gone. See Prior Post
No comments:
Post a Comment