What's for Dinner?

It's fun that so many people have liked the stew and painting analogies as I've related them to song writing. I'm enjoying the device as well, so I'll be analogically retentive.

What's for dinner? This often evokes a tension between the desire for the familiar and the appeal of something new. Bangers and Mash? or Char Grilled Prawns with Lime & Chili?

Now, an interesting observation I'd make about myself. As I've been running play lists and jamming to them to get all the musical muscles and neurons firing again, the tunes I love have pretty stock chord progressions in them. Bangers and Mash.

Other tunes I think are "cool." They appeal to my intellect and my music sense but they often don't grab me the way the simpler stuff does. Char Grilled Prawns.

Now, I'm hardly going to do an album to re-hash the past. There's a lot to be said, however, for dropping the intellectual posing and writing tunes that really grab me.

I think I've decided the right thing to do is balance the menu. Some stuff that's familiar in it's harmonic structure and some stuff that's a bit more adventurous.

I realized I had other things to balance, like the basic themes. It's easy to lapse into too much happy, sadness, love or anger.

(I'm glad I'm past the time of my life when I had to write every friend and relative that got married a forever commitment love song)

Or tempo - frantic vs. laid back.

Or style - narrative versus lyrical.

Methinks I'm going to need to boot up Excel and plan the menu a bit to make sure it's properly balanced. I don't entirely trust my unguided inclinations.

Wendy's Tune

Some minor progress on Wendy's tune. I was working on the intro and didn't like how my IV-V, IV-V progression was working - the mood was wrong. I wanted it to hold together a bit better but I didn't want to change the progression too much.

I tried it by holding a pedal IV bass through the progression. Perfect. It hangs together but catches the lazy mood I had in mind.

I still have to get the verses and bridge finished up and tighten the lyrics but when you song write 20 minutes at a time, you do it in steps.