Songs rarely arrive neatly, at least not for me. ("Like" did, and I almost resent it for that: it makes every other writing process seem proportionally harder.) "Posthistoric" took multiple tries, across two notebooks, with months elapsing between the initial idea and the finished song.
There are almost always a lot of early lines that don't make it to the final song. Sometimes you have to write an idea down to figure out that it doesn't belong. I had forgotten that this draft included a reference to the Loudness War.
People tend to assume that I have some great overarching System of Ink Color. I do always have a lot of different-colored pens around: my day gigs involve (or used to involve) a lot of proofreading on hard-copy layouts; in rehearsals, I try to color-code my line and blocking notes by day, so I can tell at a glance which ones are the most recent. In the music notebooks, though, a change in ink color just means I started the song, stalled out, and happened to grab a different pen when I came back to it later.
The "URL" line that ends the recording appeared on its own at least a year ago, with no attached idea for a song. I thought for a while that it might just wind up being a stand-alone joke in the liner notes. In this song, it's still a little detached from the rest, but...well, if it doesn't belong in this song, it doesn't belong anywhere.
Below is a verse I couldn't use (though I did put the Joyce quote at the top of the lyrics on Bandcamp). I always tell myself I'm saving such things for later. It's rarely true. But I do love the image of some future historian tracing thoughts in the embossed lines of a rollerball point on a seemingly blank scrap of paper.
There are almost always a lot of early lines that don't make it to the final song. Sometimes you have to write an idea down to figure out that it doesn't belong. I had forgotten that this draft included a reference to the Loudness War.
People tend to assume that I have some great overarching System of Ink Color. I do always have a lot of different-colored pens around: my day gigs involve (or used to involve) a lot of proofreading on hard-copy layouts; in rehearsals, I try to color-code my line and blocking notes by day, so I can tell at a glance which ones are the most recent. In the music notebooks, though, a change in ink color just means I started the song, stalled out, and happened to grab a different pen when I came back to it later.
The "URL" line that ends the recording appeared on its own at least a year ago, with no attached idea for a song. I thought for a while that it might just wind up being a stand-alone joke in the liner notes. In this song, it's still a little detached from the rest, but...well, if it doesn't belong in this song, it doesn't belong anywhere.
Below is a verse I couldn't use (though I did put the Joyce quote at the top of the lyrics on Bandcamp). I always tell myself I'm saving such things for later. It's rarely true. But I do love the image of some future historian tracing thoughts in the embossed lines of a rollerball point on a seemingly blank scrap of paper.
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